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144144Democracy Now! - Middle Easten-USDemocracy Now! - Middle EastCould Historic Iran Nuclear Deal Transform the Middle East?http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/14/could_historic_iran_nuclear_deal_transform
tag:democracynow.org,2015-07-14:en/story/5a16de AMY GOODMAN : Iran has reached a nuclear deal with the United States and five major world powers, capping more than a decade of negotiations. Under the deal, sanctions imposed on Iran would be lifted in return for Iran agreeing to long-term curbs on its nuclear program. The deal allows Iran to maintain a civilian nuclear program, but aims to prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons. Earlier this morning in a national address that was also broadcast on Iranian television, President Obama said every pathway for Iran to a nuclear weapon has been cut off.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not: a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. ... This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring. Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off. And the inspection and transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in place.
Because of this deal, Iran will not produce the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that form the raw materials necessary for a nuclear bomb. Because of this deal, Iran will remove two-thirds of its installed centrifuges, the machines necessary to produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb, and store them under constant international supervision. Iran will not use its advanced centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for the next decade. Iran will also get rid of 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium. To put that in perspective, Iran currently has a stockpile that could produce up to 10 nuclear weapons. Because of this deal, that stockpile will be reduced to a fraction of what would be required for a single weapon.
AMY GOODMAN : During his speech, President Obama vowed to veto any congressional legislation to block the deal. The Iran nuclear agreement came after Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Secretary Javad Zarif spent more than two weeks in negotiations. Speaking in Vienna, Zarif described the day as an &quot;historic moment.&quot;
JAVAD ZARIF : Let me begin by expressing my appreciation to everybody, to those who started this process and those who have continued this process in order to reach a win-win solution on what, in our view, was an unnecessary crisis, and open new horizons for dealing with serious problems that affect our international community. I believe this is a historic moment. We are reaching an agreement that is not perfect for anybody, but it is what we could accomplish, and it is an important achievement for all of us. Today could have been the end of hope on this issue, but now we are starting a new chapter of hope.
AMY GOODMAN : Under the deal, sanctions on Iran could be reinstated in 65 days if the deal is violated. A U.N. weapons embargo is to remain in place for five years, and a ban on buying missile technology will remain for eight years. Despite these measures, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deal a &quot;bad mistake of historic proportions.&quot;
We go now to Vienna, where we&#8217;re joined again by Flynt Leverett, author of Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran . He&#8217;s a professor of international affairs at Penn State; served for over a decade in the U.S. government as a senior analyst at the CIA , a Middle East specialist for the State Department and as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.
Well, Flynt, we spoke yesterday. Today, the deal has been reached. Can you tell us the outlines of it and your reaction to it?
FLYNT LEVERETT : I think the outlines, I would emphasize three main sets of commitments. On the Iranian side, of course, there are a number of commitments spelled out relatively early on in the agreement—all totaled, 159 pages with the annexes. But there is a set of commitments that Iran undertakes regarding certain limits on its nuclear activities that will address nonproliferation concerns that the United States and some other countries have had. As an analyst, I have personally never been persuaded that Iran was seeking to build a nuclear weapon, but for those who are concerned about that possibility or that risk, I think this is a very good deal from a nonproliferation standpoint.
At the same time, in terms of nuclear commitments, I think Iran has achieved something very significant here, which is basically a recognition of the reality that states have a right to a peaceful use of civil nuclear technology in all respects. This is not a right that is granted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty; it is a sovereign right that&#8217;s recognized by the treaty. From an Iranian perspective, the United States and the Security Council tried for years to deny Iran that right. And now, without Iran having sacrificed it, the international community is recognizing that right, and I think that&#8217;s an important step on the nonproliferation front, as well.
The second big set of commitments concerns sanctions relief. In return for Iran accepting these limits on its nuclear capabilities, all international sanctions authorized by the United Nations Security Council are going to be removed. European Union sanctions against Iran will be terminated. And the United States will, the language says, cease implementing its secondary sanctions, the sanctions that it threatens to impose on third countries that do business with Iran. The United States will stop implementing those sanctions, although they are likely to stay authorized in American law for some period of years. The president, President Obama, basically will waive the implementation of those sanctions. So I think that&#8217;s another second set of commitments.
And then there&#8217;s a third set of commitments related to implementing this deal. And basically, the agreement sets up processes, committees, commissions that will oversee the implementation of this deal. There&#8217;s a special committee set up to deal with the issue of inspections, with the International Atomic Energy Agency asked to visit a nonnuclear site that it doesn&#8217;t regularly inspect, and Iran is uncomfortable about that happening. There is now a committee process laid out which will, you know, review why does the IAEA want to come to this site, what is the basis for their concern, what are Iran&#8217;s concerns about letting the agency in, and, you know, will weigh those and ultimately adjudicate or arbitrate those kinds of situations, if they arrive.
AMY GOODMAN : Flynt—Flynt Leverett, I just want to—
FLYNT LEVERETT : And that&#8217;s actually the first time that this has been done.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to ask you about what&#8217;s going to happen in Congress right now, a battle royale. Now, President Obama has already, in his national address, said he will veto any rejection of this. And then it will go, of course, back to Congress to try to overturn his veto. But for those who say this is a terrorist nation, that it doesn&#8217;t stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb but simply delays it 10 or 15 years down the road, your response?
FLYNT LEVERETT : You know, I think, for people who say that, you know, I think they really—the burden of proof should be on them to prove that it is actually Iran&#8217;s intent to build nuclear weapons and that the kinds of—you know, even after this deal runs out, Iran is still going to be bound by the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty not to build nuclear weapons. I went to work for the U.S. government in 1992 and have been hearing ever since, from Israeli intelligence agencies, from U.S. intelligence agencies, that Iran is three to five years away from being able to build a nuclear weapon. And every year we just push that—we just push that three- to five-year estimate further, further out. You know, I think at this point we really need to ask ourselves, is Iran—does Iran really have the intention to build a nuclear weapon? And I don&#8217;t think there is any evidence that they do.
AMY GOODMAN : And to those who say now, with the sanctions lifted, it will simply be able to give more support, for example, to Bashar al-Assad of Syria, talk about an issue you ended with yesterday in our conversation, which was your feeling that President Obama is selling this in the wrong way, that it should be talked overall about a shifting of U.S. policy in the Middle East. But begin with that issue of those who say this is a terrorist nation supporting terrorists, and now they&#8217;ll have more money to do that.
FLYNT LEVERETT : My wife and I have been arguing for years, both inside the U.S. government when we served there and in the years since we left government, that the United States, for its own interests, needs to come to terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Relying overly much on partnerships with Israel and Saudi Arabia is increasingly dysfunctional for the U.S. position in the region. It is breeding jihadi terrorism across the region. It is enabling open-ended Israeli occupation of Arab populations. All of that is ultimately bad for the United States. The only way the United States can recover from the many tragic mistakes it has made in this part of the world in recent years, and put itself on a more positive trajectory, is by coming to terms with Iran. Iran is a rising regional power. It is a legitimate political order for most Iranians who live inside their country. We need to come to terms with that reality.
AMY GOODMAN : There was a discussion in the media today, those who are saying Iran is involved with something like four wars, you know, against the United States. But, in fact, that is not exactly true, is it, Flynt Leverett? I mean, look at Iraq. The U.S. is not looking at—
FLYNT LEVERETT : Yeah, you know—
AMY GOODMAN : The U.S. is working on the side of Iran.
FLYNT LEVERETT : And you look at—that&#8217;s right. If you look at the constituencies that Iran supports in these various arenas, we may want to label them terrorists, but the reality is, these are unavoidable constituencies in their societies with real and legitimate grievances. And what Iran does more than anything else is to help these communities organize in various ways to press their grievances more effectively. That&#8217;s why Iran&#8217;s influence is rising.
If we want to be serious about conflict resolution in Syria, not about funding, working with the Saudis to fund jihadi militants that end up coalescing into either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, if we want to get serious about conflict resolution in Syria, we need to be talking with and working in a serious way with Iran. If we want to get serious about conflict resolution in Iraq and dealing with the Islamic State in a serious and effective way, we need to stop just letting the Saudis and helping the Saudis fund the jihadi militants that create these groups, and we need to work with Iran to devise a regional strategy to contain that threat.
It is an extremely unpopular thing to say in the United States. My wife and I have paid various kinds of personal and professional prices for making this argument over the years. But the reality is, if the United States is going to have a more effective foreign policy in the Middle East—and, frankly, a more humane and constructive foreign policy in the Middle East—rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran is essential to that end.
AMY GOODMAN : Flynt Leverett, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of international affairs at Penn State, formerly worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the National Security Council, co-author, with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, of a book dealing with Going to Tehran .
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at another deal, this one in Athens, Greece. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: Iran has reached a nuclear deal with the United States and five major world powers, capping more than a decade of negotiations. Under the deal, sanctions imposed on Iran would be lifted in return for Iran agreeing to long-term curbs on its nuclear program. The deal allows Iran to maintain a civilian nuclear program, but aims to prevent Iran from ever developing nuclear weapons. Earlier this morning in a national address that was also broadcast on Iranian television, President Obama said every pathway for Iran to a nuclear weapon has been cut off.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States, together with our international partners, has achieved something that decades of animosity has not: a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. ... This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring. Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off. And the inspection and transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in place.

Because of this deal, Iran will not produce the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that form the raw materials necessary for a nuclear bomb. Because of this deal, Iran will remove two-thirds of its installed centrifuges, the machines necessary to produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb, and store them under constant international supervision. Iran will not use its advanced centrifuges to produce enriched uranium for the next decade. Iran will also get rid of 98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium. To put that in perspective, Iran currently has a stockpile that could produce up to 10 nuclear weapons. Because of this deal, that stockpile will be reduced to a fraction of what would be required for a single weapon.

AMYGOODMAN: During his speech, President Obama vowed to veto any congressional legislation to block the deal. The Iran nuclear agreement came after Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Secretary Javad Zarif spent more than two weeks in negotiations. Speaking in Vienna, Zarif described the day as an "historic moment."

JAVADZARIF: Let me begin by expressing my appreciation to everybody, to those who started this process and those who have continued this process in order to reach a win-win solution on what, in our view, was an unnecessary crisis, and open new horizons for dealing with serious problems that affect our international community. I believe this is a historic moment. We are reaching an agreement that is not perfect for anybody, but it is what we could accomplish, and it is an important achievement for all of us. Today could have been the end of hope on this issue, but now we are starting a new chapter of hope.

AMYGOODMAN: Under the deal, sanctions on Iran could be reinstated in 65 days if the deal is violated. A U.N. weapons embargo is to remain in place for five years, and a ban on buying missile technology will remain for eight years. Despite these measures, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the deal a "bad mistake of historic proportions."

We go now to Vienna, where we’re joined again by Flynt Leverett, author of Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran. He’s a professor of international affairs at Penn State; served for over a decade in the U.S. government as a senior analyst at the CIA, a Middle East specialist for the State Department and as senior director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council.

Well, Flynt, we spoke yesterday. Today, the deal has been reached. Can you tell us the outlines of it and your reaction to it?

FLYNTLEVERETT: I think the outlines, I would emphasize three main sets of commitments. On the Iranian side, of course, there are a number of commitments spelled out relatively early on in the agreement—all totaled, 159 pages with the annexes. But there is a set of commitments that Iran undertakes regarding certain limits on its nuclear activities that will address nonproliferation concerns that the United States and some other countries have had. As an analyst, I have personally never been persuaded that Iran was seeking to build a nuclear weapon, but for those who are concerned about that possibility or that risk, I think this is a very good deal from a nonproliferation standpoint.

At the same time, in terms of nuclear commitments, I think Iran has achieved something very significant here, which is basically a recognition of the reality that states have a right to a peaceful use of civil nuclear technology in all respects. This is not a right that is granted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty; it is a sovereign right that’s recognized by the treaty. From an Iranian perspective, the United States and the Security Council tried for years to deny Iran that right. And now, without Iran having sacrificed it, the international community is recognizing that right, and I think that’s an important step on the nonproliferation front, as well.

The second big set of commitments concerns sanctions relief. In return for Iran accepting these limits on its nuclear capabilities, all international sanctions authorized by the United Nations Security Council are going to be removed. European Union sanctions against Iran will be terminated. And the United States will, the language says, cease implementing its secondary sanctions, the sanctions that it threatens to impose on third countries that do business with Iran. The United States will stop implementing those sanctions, although they are likely to stay authorized in American law for some period of years. The president, President Obama, basically will waive the implementation of those sanctions. So I think that’s another second set of commitments.

And then there’s a third set of commitments related to implementing this deal. And basically, the agreement sets up processes, committees, commissions that will oversee the implementation of this deal. There’s a special committee set up to deal with the issue of inspections, with the International Atomic Energy Agency asked to visit a nonnuclear site that it doesn’t regularly inspect, and Iran is uncomfortable about that happening. There is now a committee process laid out which will, you know, review why does the IAEA want to come to this site, what is the basis for their concern, what are Iran’s concerns about letting the agency in, and, you know, will weigh those and ultimately adjudicate or arbitrate those kinds of situations, if they arrive.

AMYGOODMAN: Flynt—Flynt Leverett, I just want to—

FLYNTLEVERETT: And that’s actually the first time that this has been done.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to ask you about what’s going to happen in Congress right now, a battle royale. Now, President Obama has already, in his national address, said he will veto any rejection of this. And then it will go, of course, back to Congress to try to overturn his veto. But for those who say this is a terrorist nation, that it doesn’t stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb but simply delays it 10 or 15 years down the road, your response?

FLYNTLEVERETT: You know, I think, for people who say that, you know, I think they really—the burden of proof should be on them to prove that it is actually Iran’s intent to build nuclear weapons and that the kinds of—you know, even after this deal runs out, Iran is still going to be bound by the obligations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty not to build nuclear weapons. I went to work for the U.S. government in 1992 and have been hearing ever since, from Israeli intelligence agencies, from U.S. intelligence agencies, that Iran is three to five years away from being able to build a nuclear weapon. And every year we just push that—we just push that three- to five-year estimate further, further out. You know, I think at this point we really need to ask ourselves, is Iran—does Iran really have the intention to build a nuclear weapon? And I don’t think there is any evidence that they do.

AMYGOODMAN: And to those who say now, with the sanctions lifted, it will simply be able to give more support, for example, to Bashar al-Assad of Syria, talk about an issue you ended with yesterday in our conversation, which was your feeling that President Obama is selling this in the wrong way, that it should be talked overall about a shifting of U.S. policy in the Middle East. But begin with that issue of those who say this is a terrorist nation supporting terrorists, and now they’ll have more money to do that.

FLYNTLEVERETT: My wife and I have been arguing for years, both inside the U.S. government when we served there and in the years since we left government, that the United States, for its own interests, needs to come to terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Relying overly much on partnerships with Israel and Saudi Arabia is increasingly dysfunctional for the U.S. position in the region. It is breeding jihadi terrorism across the region. It is enabling open-ended Israeli occupation of Arab populations. All of that is ultimately bad for the United States. The only way the United States can recover from the many tragic mistakes it has made in this part of the world in recent years, and put itself on a more positive trajectory, is by coming to terms with Iran. Iran is a rising regional power. It is a legitimate political order for most Iranians who live inside their country. We need to come to terms with that reality.

AMYGOODMAN: There was a discussion in the media today, those who are saying Iran is involved with something like four wars, you know, against the United States. But, in fact, that is not exactly true, is it, Flynt Leverett? I mean, look at Iraq. The U.S. is not looking at—

FLYNTLEVERETT: Yeah, you know—

AMYGOODMAN: The U.S. is working on the side of Iran.

FLYNTLEVERETT: And you look at—that’s right. If you look at the constituencies that Iran supports in these various arenas, we may want to label them terrorists, but the reality is, these are unavoidable constituencies in their societies with real and legitimate grievances. And what Iran does more than anything else is to help these communities organize in various ways to press their grievances more effectively. That’s why Iran’s influence is rising.

If we want to be serious about conflict resolution in Syria, not about funding, working with the Saudis to fund jihadi militants that end up coalescing into either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, if we want to get serious about conflict resolution in Syria, we need to be talking with and working in a serious way with Iran. If we want to get serious about conflict resolution in Iraq and dealing with the Islamic State in a serious and effective way, we need to stop just letting the Saudis and helping the Saudis fund the jihadi militants that create these groups, and we need to work with Iran to devise a regional strategy to contain that threat.

It is an extremely unpopular thing to say in the United States. My wife and I have paid various kinds of personal and professional prices for making this argument over the years. But the reality is, if the United States is going to have a more effective foreign policy in the Middle East—and, frankly, a more humane and constructive foreign policy in the Middle East—rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran is essential to that end.

AMYGOODMAN: Flynt Leverett, I want to thank you for being with us, professor of international affairs at Penn State, formerly worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as the National Security Council, co-author, with his wife, Hillary Mann Leverett, of a book dealing with Going to Tehran.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at another deal, this one in Athens, Greece. Stay with us.

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Tue, 14 Jul 2015 00:00:00 -0400"From Bad to Worse": Hundreds Dead & 100,000 Displaced as Saudi-Led Strikes Push Yemen to the Brinkhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/7/from_bad_to_worse_hundreds_dead
tag:democracynow.org,2015-04-07:en/story/4335ca AARON MATÉ: We begin in Yemen, where intense fighting between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to ousted President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi continues to rage. The U.N. says hundreds have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced since Saudi Arabia launched a military campaign two weeks ago. Speaking today in Geneva, U.N. officials said at least 74 children have died since the Saudi strikes began.
CHRISTIAN LINDMEIER : The estimations from 6 April, as of yesterday, are 540 people have been killed and some 1,700 wounded by the violence in Yemen since 19 March.
CHRISTOPHE BOULIERAC : Seventy-four children are known to have been killed and 44 children maimed so far since the fighting began on 26 March. But we say we are aware that these are conservative figures, and we believe that the total number of children killed is much higher.
AMY GOODMAN : The Red Cross has warned of a dire humanitarian situation and demanded access to besieged areas. The most intense violence is in the southern city of Aden with more than 140 people reportedly killed in a 24-hour period. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has asked Pakistan to provide soldiers, heightening the possibility of a ground invasion.
For more, we&#8217;re joined by journalist Safa Al Ahmad. Her latest documentary, The Fight for Yemen , premieres tonight on Frontline on PBS stations across the United States. In the film, Safa was granted extremely rare access to the Houthis as they advanced in Yemen.
Welcome to Democracy Now! , Safa Al Ahmad. Can you talk about the fight for Yemen and this access you had, who the Houthis are, how you followed them in Yemen?
SAFA AL AHMAD : I&#8217;ve been very curious about the Houthis for years now, especially—I&#8217;ve been going to Yemen for a few years, and I&#8217;ve always wanted to get that access to the Houthis. So, finally, when I heard last September that they&#8217;ve surrounded the capital Sana&#8217;a, I thought that things would escalate if they actually took over the city. And they&#8217;re very interesting, because they&#8217;re a very young group, and they keep morphing their understanding of who they are and what they want as they progress. And so it&#8217;s very hard to pin it down to one thing. But if I must describe the Houthis in one line, it would be the revivalist Zaydis with strong anti-imperialist agenda. And so, they have these really big words to describe who they are and what they want, but in reality they want control in Yemen. And this is what they&#8217;ve done. They didn&#8217;t have enough by just controlling Sana&#8217;a, but they&#8217;ve come across most of North Yemen, and now they&#8217;ve reached Aden.
AARON MATÉ: And, Safa, the conventional line that we hear is that they receive heavy backing from Iran. What&#8217;s your assessment of that?
SAFA AL AHMAD : Yeah, I think that that&#8217;s vastly overblown. There is very little good journalism that&#8217;s been done to prove the extent of the relationship between the Houthis and Iran. I don&#8217;t doubt that there is a relationship between the Houthis and Iran, but how extensive is that? For people to blatantly call them Iranian-backed Shia militia, I think that&#8217;s very, very problematic. The Houthis have local agenda. They have local grievances and local power. And the rise of the Houthis themselves had nothing to do with the Iranians. Whether they—I think there is a relationship between the Iranians and the Houthis at the moment, but not to the extent that the world claims there is for Iran. Saudi Arabia has deeper connections with Yemen. They have a large border with Yemen. And the Saudis have funded, sent money directly, and arms, to different groups inside Yemen. So, I would argue, between the two, Saudi Arabia has the much bigger influence and the upper hand in Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN : And talk about the role right now of Saudi Arabia, what exactly is happening in Yemen on the ground, the conditions of people there. In a moment, we&#8217;re going to be speaking with an arms control expert who will talk about the Obama administration pouring more money into making more weapons sales than any administration since World War II. The largest recipient of those—of that military aid and weaponry is, of course, to Saudi Arabia.
SAFA AL AHMAD : Yes, I mean, record-breaking number of contracts, I think, have been sold to the Saudis in the past few years. I don&#8217;t know who they&#8217;re using them against. I mean, Yemen is a very—I mean, Yemen is the poorest Arab country. And so, to have this huge alliance against Yemen for allegedly trying to break the back of the Houthis, I think, belies it, because now the Houthis have come to Aden, which is what the airstrikes were allegedly trying to stop from happening. So the Houthis have large alliances on the ground. They didn&#8217;t—they&#8217;re not an occupying power coming from nowhere. They&#8217;ve been working on spreading that alliance throughout the areas that they controlled. And so, the war, the Saudi war on Yemen, Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen, will have very limited impact on the power of the Houthis on the ground, unless there are ground troops. And even then, what is the solution? I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s the endgame with this. I mean, the Saudis claim that it is to bring back the legitimate president, Abdu Mansour Hadi, back to Yemen. But I think, for a lot of Yemenis, he has lost his credibility. He has lost his legitimacy. He&#8217;s called for a war on his own people. And now he&#8217;s sitting at Riyadh. I think, for a lot of people, that&#8217;s extremely problematic. The humanitarian crisis is astounding, to begin with, even before this, and now with the whole air and sea embargo on Yemen, there is very little fuel, there is a food shortage. I mean, it&#8217;s frightening what&#8217;s happening now in Yemen, and heartbreaking. I mean, the numbers that the U.N. is saying are most likely much lower than what&#8217;s actually on the ground.
AARON MATÉ: Safa, so what do you see as the solution? Because some would say that the Houthis are also allied with a former president who also has lost credibility, Saleh. So what is the answer here?
SAFA AL AHMAD : Yeah, Ali Saleh, yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of people blame Ali Saleh for all of this. He&#8217;s the one who has waged six wars against the Houthis, because of his fear of their advancement. And now they&#8217;re allied together. But in the end, I think the problem is you can&#8217;t just look at what&#8217;s happening now, as in today or this week in Yemen. This problem has been going on for a long time. The Americans—if we&#8217;re going to specify, the Americans, in their involvement in Yemen, have supported a dictator, which is Ali Saleh, and even when the revolution happened to oust him in 2011, they continued to support corrupt political parties that have only their own personal interest. And the U.N. has played a detrimental part in what is happening in Yemen, as well. And so, all the peaceful civil society that had helped bring this revolution on were put to the side, and only the political parties that—and Americans and the U.N. and the GCC , including Saudi Arabia, we&#8217;re dealing with. And so, I mean, they can&#8217;t just look at the situation now in Yemen and say, &quot;Oh, look what&#8217;s happening.&quot; Well, you had a role to play in where Yemen is right now. I mean the Americans. There was an article the other day. When the special forces left Al Anad military base, they left $500 million worth of arms in the base. Who do they think has control of that now? They don&#8217;t know, probably. Yes? And this is part of the really problematic American foreign policy when it comes to Yemen, this tunnel vision about antiterrorism. So, whoever is the dictator in control, he is our only ally against al-Qaeda, like that&#8217;s the only problem. And the drone strikes now have completely and utterly failed. Instead of crushing al-Qaeda, now we hear alliances to ISIS . So, I mean, the situation keeps getting from bad to worse.
AMY GOODMAN : Safa, before your film tonight that will be airing around the United States, The Fight for Yemen , you made the film Saudi&#8217;s Secret Uprising in Saudi Arabia. Can you briefly tell us about that and how it illuminates the Saudi regime?
SAFA AL AHMAD : I mean, I&#8217;ve been following the protests that have been happening in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia for a while, and I finally got commissioned by the BBC to do a documentary about it. And so, this is unprecedented, historic event in Saudi Arabia, where there are protests consistently for over three years now. And nobody has been covering it, and nobody is talking about it, although it was happening within the context of all the other revolutions that were happening in the Arab world. Of course, it wasn&#8217;t a revolution; it was an uprising and protest. Yet it goes into the whole idea of the stereotypical image of Saudi Arabia. Nobody really wants to talk about the issues that are domestically happening inside the country.
The protests started with—like a lot of the others, like, for example, in Libya, for freeing prisoners, political prisoners. And instead of freeing the political prisoners, the government had increased its own detentions of the people who went out on the street to protest. And so, the escalation of demands from the protesters kept getting higher as the government continued to oppress the protests. And we can put it within the context of what&#8217;s happening in the whole Middle East, where the people are trying to renegotiate their relationship with their governments. And unfortunately, in the Arab world, most of them are dictatorships, and they do not tolerate another voice. And then they treat them with violence. And then they are surprised when the protesters turn violent, as well. And so, they&#8217;ve created the enemy they need. They don&#8217;t want peaceful protests. They don&#8217;t want civil society. They don&#8217;t want a peaceful form of reform in the country. They just want to continue the status quo.
AARON MATÉ: And, Safa—
SAFA AL AHMAD : And that goes back to Yemen, as well.
AARON MATÉ: And, Safa, in terms of that status quo, how decisive is the U.S., in your view?
SAFA AL AHMAD : How decisive? What do you mean?
AARON MATÉ: How decisive is the role of the U.S. in supporting these autocratic regimes that you describe? How critical is that to maintaining their power and their repression?
SAFA AL AHMAD : I mean, there are two things. There is an internal issue, where if the people themselves have decided, like with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, that there&#8217;s no longer any possibility for this rule to continue, then that will happen despite American intervention. But that does not relieve the American foreign policy from the responsibilities they have. If they&#8217;re going to pay lip service to human rights violations and them respecting democracy and them wanting these kind of things in the Middle East, then they need to stop arming dictatorships to the teeth, and then surprised when they&#8217;re used against their own people. And I think it&#8217;s a really hypocritical line that the Americans are using towards the Middle East. You can&#8217;t have it both ways. You can&#8217;t claim you want democracy, and then you&#8217;re the number one seller of arms to those dictatorships. It&#8217;s quite problematic. And I think, like this whole—the news in the past couple weeks about Sweden stopping selling weapons to Saudi Arabia because of women&#8217;s rights. I&#8217;m like, &quot;Come on, did you just know? Did you just find out that women didn&#8217;t have rights, that people don&#8217;t have human rights in Saudi Arabia, that they are an oppressive regime?&quot; So, I think it&#8217;s quite opportunistic, as well, in that perspective. We need to have more complex, more in-depth stories and coverage of countries like Saudi Arabia, because they play a huge role in the region. So, continuing to talk about it in this really simplistic way is really detrimental to be understanding of what&#8217;s actually happening on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Safa Al Ahmad, as you covered the Houthi in Yemen, how did they respond to you as a Saudi journalist and filmmaker?
SAFA AL AHMAD : It took a lot of talking. I mean, it helped because I knew a lot of those people from before they came into power. So, I&#8217;ve been coming to Yemen for years, and they knew me. They knew that I&#8217;ve tried to go to Sa&#8217;dah several times. And so I didn&#8217;t have a sudden interest in what was going on now. But even then, they were very worried about media, to begin with. And it took a lot of talking, a lot of convincing. And every step of the way, I needed to talk more and try to get more access. So, it was never at some point—like I never had carte blanche access to them. It never worked out that way. They&#8217;re very, very secretive about their decision-making process, the filming of people who are involved as members. So it was a constant negotiation. I was never just given access just like that. That&#8217;s why it took so long to get that access that I did in the end.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Safa Al Ahmad, I want to thank you for being with us, Saudi journalist and filmmaker. Her latest documentary, The Fight for Yemen , premieres tonight on Frontline on PBS around the United States. Safa just won a 2015 Freedom of Expression Award from the Index on Censorship for her film, Saudi&#8217;s Secret Uprising .
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at the weapon sales of the Obama administration, and then &quot;Cowspiracy.&quot; What does consumption of meat have to do with the drought in California? Stay with us. AARON MATÉ: We begin in Yemen, where intense fighting between Houthi rebels and forces loyal to ousted President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi continues to rage. The U.N. says hundreds have been killed and more than 100,000 displaced since Saudi Arabia launched a military campaign two weeks ago. Speaking today in Geneva, U.N. officials said at least 74 children have died since the Saudi strikes began.

CHRISTIANLINDMEIER: The estimations from 6 April, as of yesterday, are 540 people have been killed and some 1,700 wounded by the violence in Yemen since 19 March.

CHRISTOPHEBOULIERAC: Seventy-four children are known to have been killed and 44 children maimed so far since the fighting began on 26 March. But we say we are aware that these are conservative figures, and we believe that the total number of children killed is much higher.

AMYGOODMAN: The Red Cross has warned of a dire humanitarian situation and demanded access to besieged areas. The most intense violence is in the southern city of Aden with more than 140 people reportedly killed in a 24-hour period. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has asked Pakistan to provide soldiers, heightening the possibility of a ground invasion.

For more, we’re joined by journalist Safa Al Ahmad. Her latest documentary, The Fight for Yemen, premieres tonight on Frontline on PBS stations across the United States. In the film, Safa was granted extremely rare access to the Houthis as they advanced in Yemen.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Safa Al Ahmad. Can you talk about the fight for Yemen and this access you had, who the Houthis are, how you followed them in Yemen?

SAFA AL AHMAD: I’ve been very curious about the Houthis for years now, especially—I’ve been going to Yemen for a few years, and I’ve always wanted to get that access to the Houthis. So, finally, when I heard last September that they’ve surrounded the capital Sana’a, I thought that things would escalate if they actually took over the city. And they’re very interesting, because they’re a very young group, and they keep morphing their understanding of who they are and what they want as they progress. And so it’s very hard to pin it down to one thing. But if I must describe the Houthis in one line, it would be the revivalist Zaydis with strong anti-imperialist agenda. And so, they have these really big words to describe who they are and what they want, but in reality they want control in Yemen. And this is what they’ve done. They didn’t have enough by just controlling Sana’a, but they’ve come across most of North Yemen, and now they’ve reached Aden.

AARON MATÉ: And, Safa, the conventional line that we hear is that they receive heavy backing from Iran. What’s your assessment of that?

SAFA AL AHMAD: Yeah, I think that that’s vastly overblown. There is very little good journalism that’s been done to prove the extent of the relationship between the Houthis and Iran. I don’t doubt that there is a relationship between the Houthis and Iran, but how extensive is that? For people to blatantly call them Iranian-backed Shia militia, I think that’s very, very problematic. The Houthis have local agenda. They have local grievances and local power. And the rise of the Houthis themselves had nothing to do with the Iranians. Whether they—I think there is a relationship between the Iranians and the Houthis at the moment, but not to the extent that the world claims there is for Iran. Saudi Arabia has deeper connections with Yemen. They have a large border with Yemen. And the Saudis have funded, sent money directly, and arms, to different groups inside Yemen. So, I would argue, between the two, Saudi Arabia has the much bigger influence and the upper hand in Yemen.

AMYGOODMAN: And talk about the role right now of Saudi Arabia, what exactly is happening in Yemen on the ground, the conditions of people there. In a moment, we’re going to be speaking with an arms control expert who will talk about the Obama administration pouring more money into making more weapons sales than any administration since World War II. The largest recipient of those—of that military aid and weaponry is, of course, to Saudi Arabia.

SAFA AL AHMAD: Yes, I mean, record-breaking number of contracts, I think, have been sold to the Saudis in the past few years. I don’t know who they’re using them against. I mean, Yemen is a very—I mean, Yemen is the poorest Arab country. And so, to have this huge alliance against Yemen for allegedly trying to break the back of the Houthis, I think, belies it, because now the Houthis have come to Aden, which is what the airstrikes were allegedly trying to stop from happening. So the Houthis have large alliances on the ground. They didn’t—they’re not an occupying power coming from nowhere. They’ve been working on spreading that alliance throughout the areas that they controlled. And so, the war, the Saudi war on Yemen, Saudi-led airstrikes on Yemen, will have very limited impact on the power of the Houthis on the ground, unless there are ground troops. And even then, what is the solution? I don’t know what’s the endgame with this. I mean, the Saudis claim that it is to bring back the legitimate president, Abdu Mansour Hadi, back to Yemen. But I think, for a lot of Yemenis, he has lost his credibility. He has lost his legitimacy. He’s called for a war on his own people. And now he’s sitting at Riyadh. I think, for a lot of people, that’s extremely problematic. The humanitarian crisis is astounding, to begin with, even before this, and now with the whole air and sea embargo on Yemen, there is very little fuel, there is a food shortage. I mean, it’s frightening what’s happening now in Yemen, and heartbreaking. I mean, the numbers that the U.N. is saying are most likely much lower than what’s actually on the ground.

AARON MATÉ: Safa, so what do you see as the solution? Because some would say that the Houthis are also allied with a former president who also has lost credibility, Saleh. So what is the answer here?

SAFA AL AHMAD: Yeah, Ali Saleh, yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of people blame Ali Saleh for all of this. He’s the one who has waged six wars against the Houthis, because of his fear of their advancement. And now they’re allied together. But in the end, I think the problem is you can’t just look at what’s happening now, as in today or this week in Yemen. This problem has been going on for a long time. The Americans—if we’re going to specify, the Americans, in their involvement in Yemen, have supported a dictator, which is Ali Saleh, and even when the revolution happened to oust him in 2011, they continued to support corrupt political parties that have only their own personal interest. And the U.N. has played a detrimental part in what is happening in Yemen, as well. And so, all the peaceful civil society that had helped bring this revolution on were put to the side, and only the political parties that—and Americans and the U.N. and the GCC, including Saudi Arabia, we’re dealing with. And so, I mean, they can’t just look at the situation now in Yemen and say, "Oh, look what’s happening." Well, you had a role to play in where Yemen is right now. I mean the Americans. There was an article the other day. When the special forces left Al Anad military base, they left $500 million worth of arms in the base. Who do they think has control of that now? They don’t know, probably. Yes? And this is part of the really problematic American foreign policy when it comes to Yemen, this tunnel vision about antiterrorism. So, whoever is the dictator in control, he is our only ally against al-Qaeda, like that’s the only problem. And the drone strikes now have completely and utterly failed. Instead of crushing al-Qaeda, now we hear alliances to ISIS. So, I mean, the situation keeps getting from bad to worse.

AMYGOODMAN: Safa, before your film tonight that will be airing around the United States, The Fight for Yemen, you made the film Saudi’s Secret Uprising in Saudi Arabia. Can you briefly tell us about that and how it illuminates the Saudi regime?

SAFA AL AHMAD: I mean, I’ve been following the protests that have been happening in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia for a while, and I finally got commissioned by the BBC to do a documentary about it. And so, this is unprecedented, historic event in Saudi Arabia, where there are protests consistently for over three years now. And nobody has been covering it, and nobody is talking about it, although it was happening within the context of all the other revolutions that were happening in the Arab world. Of course, it wasn’t a revolution; it was an uprising and protest. Yet it goes into the whole idea of the stereotypical image of Saudi Arabia. Nobody really wants to talk about the issues that are domestically happening inside the country.

The protests started with—like a lot of the others, like, for example, in Libya, for freeing prisoners, political prisoners. And instead of freeing the political prisoners, the government had increased its own detentions of the people who went out on the street to protest. And so, the escalation of demands from the protesters kept getting higher as the government continued to oppress the protests. And we can put it within the context of what’s happening in the whole Middle East, where the people are trying to renegotiate their relationship with their governments. And unfortunately, in the Arab world, most of them are dictatorships, and they do not tolerate another voice. And then they treat them with violence. And then they are surprised when the protesters turn violent, as well. And so, they’ve created the enemy they need. They don’t want peaceful protests. They don’t want civil society. They don’t want a peaceful form of reform in the country. They just want to continue the status quo.

AARON MATÉ: And, Safa—

SAFA AL AHMAD: And that goes back to Yemen, as well.

AARON MATÉ: And, Safa, in terms of that status quo, how decisive is the U.S., in your view?

SAFA AL AHMAD: How decisive? What do you mean?

AARON MATÉ: How decisive is the role of the U.S. in supporting these autocratic regimes that you describe? How critical is that to maintaining their power and their repression?

SAFA AL AHMAD: I mean, there are two things. There is an internal issue, where if the people themselves have decided, like with Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, that there’s no longer any possibility for this rule to continue, then that will happen despite American intervention. But that does not relieve the American foreign policy from the responsibilities they have. If they’re going to pay lip service to human rights violations and them respecting democracy and them wanting these kind of things in the Middle East, then they need to stop arming dictatorships to the teeth, and then surprised when they’re used against their own people. And I think it’s a really hypocritical line that the Americans are using towards the Middle East. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t claim you want democracy, and then you’re the number one seller of arms to those dictatorships. It’s quite problematic. And I think, like this whole—the news in the past couple weeks about Sweden stopping selling weapons to Saudi Arabia because of women’s rights. I’m like, "Come on, did you just know? Did you just find out that women didn’t have rights, that people don’t have human rights in Saudi Arabia, that they are an oppressive regime?" So, I think it’s quite opportunistic, as well, in that perspective. We need to have more complex, more in-depth stories and coverage of countries like Saudi Arabia, because they play a huge role in the region. So, continuing to talk about it in this really simplistic way is really detrimental to be understanding of what’s actually happening on the ground.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Safa Al Ahmad, as you covered the Houthi in Yemen, how did they respond to you as a Saudi journalist and filmmaker?

SAFA AL AHMAD: It took a lot of talking. I mean, it helped because I knew a lot of those people from before they came into power. So, I’ve been coming to Yemen for years, and they knew me. They knew that I’ve tried to go to Sa’dah several times. And so I didn’t have a sudden interest in what was going on now. But even then, they were very worried about media, to begin with. And it took a lot of talking, a lot of convincing. And every step of the way, I needed to talk more and try to get more access. So, it was never at some point—like I never had carte blanche access to them. It never worked out that way. They’re very, very secretive about their decision-making process, the filming of people who are involved as members. So it was a constant negotiation. I was never just given access just like that. That’s why it took so long to get that access that I did in the end.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Safa Al Ahmad, I want to thank you for being with us, Saudi journalist and filmmaker. Her latest documentary, The Fight for Yemen, premieres tonight on Frontline on PBS around the United States. Safa just won a 2015 Freedom of Expression Award from the Index on Censorship for her film, Saudi’s Secret Uprising.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at the weapon sales of the Obama administration, and then "Cowspiracy." What does consumption of meat have to do with the drought in California? Stay with us.

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Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400Are Obama's Record Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Iraq Fueling Unrest in Middle East?http://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/7/are_obamas_record_arms_sales_to
tag:democracynow.org,2015-04-07:en/story/f68c61 AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the major increase in U.S. arms exports under President Obama. As Saudi Arabia continues U.S.-backed strikes in Yemen and Washington lifts its freeze on military aid to Egypt, new figures show the majority of U.S. weapons exports under Obama have gone to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia tops the list at $46 billion in new agreements. William Hartung writes that even after adjusting for inflation, quote, &quot;The volume of major deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion.&quot; That also means the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any other U.S. administration since World War II.
AMY GOODMAN : To talk more about these figures, we&#8217;re joined now by Bill Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. His latest book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex . He recently wrote an article headlined &quot;The Obama Arms Bazaar: Record Sales, Troubling Results.&quot;
Welcome back to Democracy Now! , Bill.
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Thanks for having me.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the numbers. Talk about the weapons. Where are they going?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, I was astonished, in researching the article, that Obama had sold this much. I mean, I knew there were record deals with the Saudis, but to outsell the eight years of Bush, to sell more than any president since World War II, was surprising even to me, who follow these things quite closely. The majority, 60 percent, have gone to the Persian Gulf and Middle East, and within that, the Saudis have been the largest recipient of things like U.S. fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, bombs, guns, almost an entire arsenal they&#8217;ve purchased just in the last few years.
AARON MATÉ: What do you think the Iran nuclear deal, if anything, portends for U.S. sales to the Middle East? President Obama is about to call a meeting at Camp David with the leaders of all the Gulf nations. Do you see them exploiting that to call for increased military purchases from the U.S.?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Unfortunately, yes. I mean, you would think a reduction of tensions should reduce the arms sales, but the Saudis have been screaming about the deal, saying, &quot;Well, you&#8217;re letting Iran off the hook,&quot; which is not the case, &quot;and therefore you have to bulk up our armaments,&quot; which is kind of insane, given the amounts that have already gone there.
AMY GOODMAN : So how does the Obama administration spending on military weapons—and is it the Obama administration spending money on military weapons or just allowing the weapons to be sold to these countries? And how does it compare to the two terms of the George W. Bush administration?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, primarily, these are sales, because the Saudis and others in the Gulf can afford them, the exceptions being aid to Egypt and Israel, which are the biggest recipients of U.S. military aid. Under Bush, they sold about $30 billion less than the $169 billion of the first five years of Obama. So already in five years, he&#8217;s outsold what Bush did in eight years.
AMY GOODMAN : And what does this mean for war in the world?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, I think we&#8217;re seeing the results now. As they mentioned in the prior segment, Saudi Arabia is using U.S. weapons to bomb Yemen. Civilians have been killed. Egypt is not exactly a democratic regime, as we know. Now they&#8217;ve opened sales again to them. They&#8217;ve supported dictators for many years, prior to Obama, which helped, in one hand, spark the Arab Spring, but also has armed the counterattacks by places like Egypt and the Saudis, the Saudis going in to crush democracy movement in Bahrain, along with the government there. So it&#8217;s been a force—a negative force for many years. I think it&#8217;s spinning out of control now.
AARON MATÉ: And your piece also points out that it&#8217;s not just U.S. arms going to regimes. When countries go haywire and into chaos, like in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, U.S. weapons end up in the hands of militants.
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Exactly. We don&#8217;t know the full numbers, but in Iraq the security forces abandoned large amounts of the weaponry to ISIS . U.S.-armed rebels in Syria, armed by the CIA , went over to join ISIS . There&#8217;s $500 million missing of weapons in Yemen. Some think it&#8217;s gone to the Houthis. Some think it&#8217;s gone to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Of course, there&#8217;s arms on both sides, because the government and the forces have split in this war. So it&#8217;s quite possible every side of that war in Yemen may have some level of U.S. weaponry. So it&#8217;s really gone, you know, haywire. It&#8217;s sort of what I call the boomerang effect, when U.S. arms end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries.
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;d like to ask about a recent exchange between Deutsche Bank analyst Myles Walton and Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson during an earnings call in January. Financial industry analysts use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability. Hewson said that Lockheed was hoping to increase sales and that both the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region were, quote, &quot;growth markets.&quot;
MARILLYN HEWSON : Even if there may be some kind of deal done with Iran, there is volatility all around the region, and each one of these countries believes they&#8217;ve got to protect their citizens, and the things that we can bring to them help in that regard. So, similarly, you know, that&#8217;s the Middle East, and I know that&#8217;s what you asked about, but you could take that same argument to the Asia-Pacific region, which is another growth area for us—a lot of volatility, a lot of instability, a lot of things that are happening both with North Korea as well as some of the tensions between China and Japan. And so, in both of those regions, which are growth areas for us, we expect that there&#8217;s going to continue to be opportunities for us to bring our capabilities to them.
AMY GOODMAN : During the phone call, Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson, who you were just listening to, also noted 20 percent of Lockheed&#8217;s sales in 2014 were international—that is, to non-American customers. She added, Lockheed has set a goal to get to 25 percent over the next few years. Can you talk about the significance of this, Bill Hartung?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, there&#8217;s been a slight blip in Pentagon procurement. It&#8217;s still quite high, but the companies need to grow constantly. And so they&#8217;re looking to up foreign sales to make up for any reductions at the Pentagon. And as we heard in the clip, they&#8217;re looking to areas of conflict. And it&#8217;s not surprising, but I&#8217;m surprised that she said it so explicitly. You know, she was asked about the Iran question: Would that depress the market? She basically said, &quot;Oh, there&#8217;s plenty of turbulence there, don&#8217;t worry about it, as there is in East Asia, and these will be our growth markets.&quot; So she&#8217;s more or less acknowledging they thrive on war and the threat of war, which is not surprising to a lot of people, but nonetheless, to say it like that, I think, is a bit shocking, to just put it right out there.
AARON MATÉ: I want to ask you about drones. Earlier this year, the White House announced it will allow foreign allies to purchase U.S.-made armed drones for the first time. Under a new policy, American firms can sell their drones abroad but will be subjected to a case-by-case review. Talk about this policy. You were very critical of it.
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Yes. I mean, it&#8217;s got some rhetoric that makes sense: You can&#8217;t use these drones to repress your own population, for illegal surveillance, to attack your neighbors. But as we&#8217;ve seen in other cases, once they&#8217;re sold, very little control over how they&#8217;re used. And given the regimes in the Persian Gulf, they&#8217;ve already sold unarmed Predators, or about to, the UAE . So it&#8217;s quite possible we&#8217;ll see, in the context of the war on Yemen, perhaps armed drones sold to some of these countries. And, you know, it&#8217;s fine to say we&#8217;re going to control their use, but the record in Iraq and Yemen and elsewhere makes that quite dubious.
AMY GOODMAN : As we see the Obama administration&#8217;s dramatic acceleration of U.S. weapons sales abroad, can you talk about the U.S. requirements on the licensing of weapons and weapons-related exports?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, the industry has wanted a relaxation for years, and the Obama administration finally delivered that. So, they took things from the State Department, which does a somewhat better job of vetting human rights and so forth, and took thousands of items and put them in the Commerce Department, which historically has been involved in promoting arms sales, not in vetting them. So, it&#8217;s going to be easier for some countries to get arms without a license, and those countries will become hubs of smuggling, no doubt. So it&#8217;s going to be counter to the—even the narrow security interests of the United States, but it&#8217;s something industry has wanted for quite a while.
AARON MATÉ: On the positive side, the world&#8217;s first treaty regulating the arms trade took effect last year, the Arms Trade Treaty. The U.S. has signed it. Senate hasn&#8217;t ratified it. But you write that that&#8217;s still a positive thing.
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Yes, I think, compared to Bush, which was joined at the hip with the NRA and wouldn&#8217;t go near the Arms Trade Treaty, at least the U.S. administration signed it, although a somewhat weaker version than some of us would have liked. It commits them on paper not to sell to human rights abusers, not to let arms that may be involved in corruption. Obviously, that&#8217;s been violated, in my opinion, in some of the current sales to the Middle East, but it&#8217;s a standard that they should be held to, because they did sign that treaty.
AMY GOODMAN : So, they sign the treaty, and they accelerate weapons sales abroad. Would you say the—financing the weapons industry is actually a motivation for being involved in wars abroad?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : I think it&#8217;s one element. I think there&#8217;s an ideological element. I think there&#8217;s an element of just U.S. global reach and global control. But certainly, a reinforcing point is to sell arms and to help these companies. And it sometimes is made quite explicit. When they sell to the Saudis, for example, the Pentagon points out it will create x number of jobs in the United States. So they&#8217;re not shy about talking about the jobs aspect.
AMY GOODMAN : So, weapons industry does better under the Democrats than the Republicans?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : I would say, at the moment, they&#8217;re doing better on the arms sales front. Slightly—
AMY GOODMAN : And where do their contributions go?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, they tip usually depending who&#8217;s in power. So they&#8217;re about two-thirds Republican in the Senate and the House, which are controlled by Republicans. They&#8217;re quite supportive of Obama. There&#8217;s such a flood of money from everywhere, sometimes it&#8217;s hard to follow one stream within that huge flow of money.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we want to thank you, Bill Hartung, for being with us. Final question: What are you recommending?
WILLIAM HARTUNG : Well, I think the Obama administration should live up to its principles on the Arms Trade Treaty. I think Congress should take a closer look at some of these sales, speak out against them. I think civil society groups which oppose this should make their voices louder, because in many cases most Americans don&#8217;t even know this is happening.
AMY GOODMAN : Bill Hartung is director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. His latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex . We&#8217;ll link to his piece , &quot;The Obama Arms Bazaar: Record Sales, Troubling Results.&quot;
When we come back, we look at the drought in California. What does it have to do with animal agriculture? What does it have to do with eating meat? Stay with us. AARON MATÉ: We turn now to the major increase in U.S. arms exports under President Obama. As Saudi Arabia continues U.S.-backed strikes in Yemen and Washington lifts its freeze on military aid to Egypt, new figures show the majority of U.S. weapons exports under Obama have gone to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia tops the list at $46 billion in new agreements. William Hartung writes that even after adjusting for inflation, quote, "The volume of major deals concluded by the Obama administration in its first five years exceeds the amount approved by the Bush administration in its full eight years in office by nearly $30 billion." That also means the Obama administration has approved more arms sales than any other U.S. administration since World War II.

AMYGOODMAN: To talk more about these figures, we’re joined now by Bill Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. His latest book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. He recently wrote an article headlined "The Obama Arms Bazaar: Record Sales, Troubling Results."

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Bill.

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Thanks for having me.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the numbers. Talk about the weapons. Where are they going?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, I was astonished, in researching the article, that Obama had sold this much. I mean, I knew there were record deals with the Saudis, but to outsell the eight years of Bush, to sell more than any president since World War II, was surprising even to me, who follow these things quite closely. The majority, 60 percent, have gone to the Persian Gulf and Middle East, and within that, the Saudis have been the largest recipient of things like U.S. fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, bombs, guns, almost an entire arsenal they’ve purchased just in the last few years.

AARON MATÉ: What do you think the Iran nuclear deal, if anything, portends for U.S. sales to the Middle East? President Obama is about to call a meeting at Camp David with the leaders of all the Gulf nations. Do you see them exploiting that to call for increased military purchases from the U.S.?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Unfortunately, yes. I mean, you would think a reduction of tensions should reduce the arms sales, but the Saudis have been screaming about the deal, saying, "Well, you’re letting Iran off the hook," which is not the case, "and therefore you have to bulk up our armaments," which is kind of insane, given the amounts that have already gone there.

AMYGOODMAN: So how does the Obama administration spending on military weapons—and is it the Obama administration spending money on military weapons or just allowing the weapons to be sold to these countries? And how does it compare to the two terms of the George W. Bush administration?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, primarily, these are sales, because the Saudis and others in the Gulf can afford them, the exceptions being aid to Egypt and Israel, which are the biggest recipients of U.S. military aid. Under Bush, they sold about $30 billion less than the $169 billion of the first five years of Obama. So already in five years, he’s outsold what Bush did in eight years.

AMYGOODMAN: And what does this mean for war in the world?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, I think we’re seeing the results now. As they mentioned in the prior segment, Saudi Arabia is using U.S. weapons to bomb Yemen. Civilians have been killed. Egypt is not exactly a democratic regime, as we know. Now they’ve opened sales again to them. They’ve supported dictators for many years, prior to Obama, which helped, in one hand, spark the Arab Spring, but also has armed the counterattacks by places like Egypt and the Saudis, the Saudis going in to crush democracy movement in Bahrain, along with the government there. So it’s been a force—a negative force for many years. I think it’s spinning out of control now.

AARON MATÉ: And your piece also points out that it’s not just U.S. arms going to regimes. When countries go haywire and into chaos, like in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, U.S. weapons end up in the hands of militants.

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Exactly. We don’t know the full numbers, but in Iraq the security forces abandoned large amounts of the weaponry to ISIS. U.S.-armed rebels in Syria, armed by the CIA, went over to join ISIS. There’s $500 million missing of weapons in Yemen. Some think it’s gone to the Houthis. Some think it’s gone to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Of course, there’s arms on both sides, because the government and the forces have split in this war. So it’s quite possible every side of that war in Yemen may have some level of U.S. weaponry. So it’s really gone, you know, haywire. It’s sort of what I call the boomerang effect, when U.S. arms end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries.

AMYGOODMAN: I’d like to ask about a recent exchange between Deutsche Bank analyst Myles Walton and Lockheed Martin chief executive Marillyn Hewson during an earnings call in January. Financial industry analysts use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability. Hewson said that Lockheed was hoping to increase sales and that both the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region were, quote, "growth markets."

MARILLYNHEWSON: Even if there may be some kind of deal done with Iran, there is volatility all around the region, and each one of these countries believes they’ve got to protect their citizens, and the things that we can bring to them help in that regard. So, similarly, you know, that’s the Middle East, and I know that’s what you asked about, but you could take that same argument to the Asia-Pacific region, which is another growth area for us—a lot of volatility, a lot of instability, a lot of things that are happening both with North Korea as well as some of the tensions between China and Japan. And so, in both of those regions, which are growth areas for us, we expect that there’s going to continue to be opportunities for us to bring our capabilities to them.

AMYGOODMAN: During the phone call, Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson, who you were just listening to, also noted 20 percent of Lockheed’s sales in 2014 were international—that is, to non-American customers. She added, Lockheed has set a goal to get to 25 percent over the next few years. Can you talk about the significance of this, Bill Hartung?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, there’s been a slight blip in Pentagon procurement. It’s still quite high, but the companies need to grow constantly. And so they’re looking to up foreign sales to make up for any reductions at the Pentagon. And as we heard in the clip, they’re looking to areas of conflict. And it’s not surprising, but I’m surprised that she said it so explicitly. You know, she was asked about the Iran question: Would that depress the market? She basically said, "Oh, there’s plenty of turbulence there, don’t worry about it, as there is in East Asia, and these will be our growth markets." So she’s more or less acknowledging they thrive on war and the threat of war, which is not surprising to a lot of people, but nonetheless, to say it like that, I think, is a bit shocking, to just put it right out there.

AARON MATÉ: I want to ask you about drones. Earlier this year, the White House announced it will allow foreign allies to purchase U.S.-made armed drones for the first time. Under a new policy, American firms can sell their drones abroad but will be subjected to a case-by-case review. Talk about this policy. You were very critical of it.

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Yes. I mean, it’s got some rhetoric that makes sense: You can’t use these drones to repress your own population, for illegal surveillance, to attack your neighbors. But as we’ve seen in other cases, once they’re sold, very little control over how they’re used. And given the regimes in the Persian Gulf, they’ve already sold unarmed Predators, or about to, the UAE. So it’s quite possible we’ll see, in the context of the war on Yemen, perhaps armed drones sold to some of these countries. And, you know, it’s fine to say we’re going to control their use, but the record in Iraq and Yemen and elsewhere makes that quite dubious.

AMYGOODMAN: As we see the Obama administration’s dramatic acceleration of U.S. weapons sales abroad, can you talk about the U.S. requirements on the licensing of weapons and weapons-related exports?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, the industry has wanted a relaxation for years, and the Obama administration finally delivered that. So, they took things from the State Department, which does a somewhat better job of vetting human rights and so forth, and took thousands of items and put them in the Commerce Department, which historically has been involved in promoting arms sales, not in vetting them. So, it’s going to be easier for some countries to get arms without a license, and those countries will become hubs of smuggling, no doubt. So it’s going to be counter to the—even the narrow security interests of the United States, but it’s something industry has wanted for quite a while.

AARON MATÉ: On the positive side, the world’s first treaty regulating the arms trade took effect last year, the Arms Trade Treaty. The U.S. has signed it. Senate hasn’t ratified it. But you write that that’s still a positive thing.

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Yes, I think, compared to Bush, which was joined at the hip with the NRA and wouldn’t go near the Arms Trade Treaty, at least the U.S. administration signed it, although a somewhat weaker version than some of us would have liked. It commits them on paper not to sell to human rights abusers, not to let arms that may be involved in corruption. Obviously, that’s been violated, in my opinion, in some of the current sales to the Middle East, but it’s a standard that they should be held to, because they did sign that treaty.

AMYGOODMAN: So, they sign the treaty, and they accelerate weapons sales abroad. Would you say the—financing the weapons industry is actually a motivation for being involved in wars abroad?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: I think it’s one element. I think there’s an ideological element. I think there’s an element of just U.S. global reach and global control. But certainly, a reinforcing point is to sell arms and to help these companies. And it sometimes is made quite explicit. When they sell to the Saudis, for example, the Pentagon points out it will create x number of jobs in the United States. So they’re not shy about talking about the jobs aspect.

AMYGOODMAN: So, weapons industry does better under the Democrats than the Republicans?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: I would say, at the moment, they’re doing better on the arms sales front. Slightly—

AMYGOODMAN: And where do their contributions go?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, they tip usually depending who’s in power. So they’re about two-thirds Republican in the Senate and the House, which are controlled by Republicans. They’re quite supportive of Obama. There’s such a flood of money from everywhere, sometimes it’s hard to follow one stream within that huge flow of money.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you, Bill Hartung, for being with us. Final question: What are you recommending?

WILLIAMHARTUNG: Well, I think the Obama administration should live up to its principles on the Arms Trade Treaty. I think Congress should take a closer look at some of these sales, speak out against them. I think civil society groups which oppose this should make their voices louder, because in many cases most Americans don’t even know this is happening.

AMYGOODMAN: Bill Hartung is director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. His latest book, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. We’ll link to his piece, "The Obama Arms Bazaar: Record Sales, Troubling Results."

When we come back, we look at the drought in California. What does it have to do with animal agriculture? What does it have to do with eating meat? Stay with us.

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Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400Former Iranian Ambassador: Historic Nuclear Deal Has Prevented a New War in the Middle Easthttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/4/3/former_iranian_ambassador_historic_nuclear_dear
tag:democracynow.org,2015-04-03:en/story/b424f6 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: After eight days of talks in Switzerland, Iran and six world powers have reached a framework agreement on curbing Iran&#8217;s nuclear program for at least a decade. In return, the United States and Europe plan to lift economic sanctions against Iran. The parties must now reach a final agreement by June 30. President Obama described the deal as historic.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Today, after many months of tough, principled diplomacy, we have achieved the framework for that deal. And it is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives. This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon. Iran will face strict limitations on its program, and Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history. So this deal is not based on trust; it&#8217;s based on unprecedented verification.
AMY GOODMAN : As part of the deal, Iran must reduce the number of its centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium into a bomb by more than two-thirds, to about 5,000 or 6,000. Iran also has to redesign a power plant so it cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium, eliminate much of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and be subject to regular international nuclear inspections. The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said the deal recognizes Iran&#8217;s right to a peaceful nuclear program.
MOHAMMAD JAVAD ZARIF : [translated] The decision we took today is very important, because it forms the basis for a full agreement. We can now begin to prepare a final draft agreement with its relevant clauses based on the solutions that we have reached over the last few days. Iran will be able to continue its peaceful nuclear program, but there will be limitations placed on the level and the duration of its enrichment program and the quantity of enriched material that can be kept.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: While U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the deal would contribute to peace and stability in the region, praise for the deal was not universal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the agreement as, quote, &quot;a threat to Israel&#8217;s existence.&quot; In Washington, Republican lawmakers are demanding the right to review the deal. Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois said, quote, &quot;Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Adolf Hitler,&quot; referring to the 1930s British prime minister and his policy of Nazi appeasement. On Thursday, President Obama urged Congress not to scuttle the deal.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : If Congress kills this deal, not based on expert analysis and without offering any reasonable alternative, then it&#8217;s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy.
AMY GOODMAN : To talk more about the nuclear deal, we&#8217;re joined by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator for Iran. He served as Iran&#8217;s ambassador to Germany from 1990 to 1997. He&#8217;s joining us now from Princeton, New Jersey, where he&#8217;s an associate research scholar at Princeton University&#8217;s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Last year, he published the book, Iran and the United States: An Insider&#8217;s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace .
Welcome to Democracy Now! , Ambassador Mousavian. Do you see this deal as historic and a road to peace?
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : Good morning. Definitely, the deal is a historic achievement, and, definitely, this is a road to peace, because the deal practically prevented a new war in the Middle East, which could be much more disastrous for the U.S. and for the region compared to the war against Afghanistan and the war on Iraq. I believe diplomacy worked. They have achieved excellent conclusion. And they should continue to reach the final comprehensive deal by end of June, the 1st of July. And then Iran and the U.S., they should negotiate on further disputed issues through diplomacy.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ambassador Mousavian, could you talk about the key aspects that have been announced of the framework, what you think were the most important, this whole issue of the sharp reduction in the number of centrifuges that Iran will have in operation, and also this issue of the breakout period that&#8217;s been discussed?
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : See, for Iranians, two points were important from the day one. The first point was to accept to respect the rights of Iran for peaceful nuclear technology, including enrichment under Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT . This was the first key issue for Iran from the day one, when we negotiated the nuclear—when we began nuclear negotiation in 2003. This deal covers these key demands of Iran. Iran would be entitled to have peaceful nuclear technology.
The second key issue for Iran was lifting the sanctions. This deal also contains, ultimately, lifting all unilateral, multilateral sanctions, nuclear-related sanctions. That&#8217;s why I believe the deal is good for Iran, because the two key elements Iran was asking already is covered in the deal.
However, the deal is good for the U.S., for the world powers, because for them the red line was no nuclear bomb, although Iran does not have a nuclear bomb, although there is no evidence of diversion in Iranian nuclear program toward weaponization. However, because of mistrust between Iran and the U.S., Iran and the West, this was a big issue for the U.S. and for the West to make sure any deal would guarantee no diversion on Iranian nuclear program toward weaponization.
This deal contains exactly the key element the U.S. was looking, because, first, Iran has accepted the maximum level of transparency and verification ever during the history of proliferation, even transparency verification measures beyond the current Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT . Second, with all the limits which you mentioned already, and President Obama also in his statement mentioned, Iran has accepted all confidence-building measures that there would be no breakout and there would be no diversion toward weaponization. As long as the deal covers the maximum level of transparency, all measures on nondiversion toward weaponization, this is a good deal for the U.S., and I told you why the deal is good for Iran.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to Mark Regev, the spokesperson for Israel&#8217;s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Shortly after the deal was reached, he tweeted, quote, &quot;PM Netanyahu to Pres Obama: A deal based on this framework would threaten the survival of Israel.&quot; Regev later appeared on CNN and lambasted the deal as &quot;very dangerous.&quot; He suggested Iran will become the next North Korea.
MARK REGEV : We see this deal as very dangerous. We say this deal is a move in the wrong direction. And if this framework actually becomes the basis, the foundation for a final deal with Iran, we see this like the deal with North Korea. I mean, you recall, in the 1990s, North Korea signed a deal that committed themselves to nonproliferation. They kept their nuclear program intact. And when they were ready, they proliferated. They exploded a nuclear device. And today they threaten East Asia. Iran is much, much more dangerous than North Korea.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev speaking on CNN . Your response, Ambassador Mousavian? He said Iran is an existential threat to Israel and that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : I think there is no difference between Israel and North Korea, because North Korea has a few number of nuclear bombs. Israel has about 400 nuclear bombs. Therefore, they both are the same: They have nuclear bombs.
And there is a big difference between Iran and Israel. They really belong to two different worlds on nonproliferation. Iran is member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Israel has never been ready to accept it. There is no evidence in Iranian nuclear program. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb. Israel has about 400 nuclear bombs. During the last 10 years, Iran has given more than 7,000 mandate inspections to International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA . This is completely unprecedented. During the history of IAEA , no other country in the world has given access to IAEA , the International Atomic Energy Agency, like Iran during the last decade. Israel, during last 50, 60 years, has not given even one inspection to the IAEA . Therefore, I believe the world and international community, they should judge who is wrong, who is right. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb. Iran has accepted every level of inspection, transparency. Iran has accepted to have completely open nuclear program. And Israel does have a nuclear bomb, and the country which does have nuclear bomb is blaming Iran, which does not have nuclear bomb.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ambassador Mousavian, I&#8217;d like to ask you about the impact that the sanctions have had on the Iranian people and Iranian society over so many years. And also, do you think that the change in government in Iran has made the West, now with President Rouhani, more willing to reach a deal?
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : I believe this is a very, very important question, not because of the nuclear deal, because of the future negotiations between Iran and the U.S. The narrative in the U.S. Congress is the deal is done because of U.S. sanctions and pressures. But the fact is, the deal was signed yesterday, is the principles. The framework is exactly like the principles and frameworks we proposed European countries in 2003 and 2005—between 2003 to 2005, the same principles. Iran was not under sanctions 2003 to 2005. After eight years of sanctions, pressures, the U.S. accepted the same principles. Why the deal was done? Why the deal was possible? There was only and only one reason. In 2003 to 2005, the U.S. was not ready to accept the legitimate rights of Iran under NPT for enrichment. The U.S. was saying the red line is enrichment. Iran cannot have one centrifuges. Iran should have zero enrichment. That&#8217;s why we couldn&#8217;t make the deal. In 2013, the preliminary deal was signed. The U.S. changed, moderated its position. The U.S. said now Iran can have enrichment under Non-Proliferation Treaty, but limited and for its practical needs. But Iran should give all assurances that it would not seek nuclear bomb. Therefore, really, the reason for the deal was not pressures and sanctions; was the U.S. to realize and to respect the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Second, sanctions had two different impacts. One, on the nuclear issue, sanctions only caused increase of Iranian nuclear program. Before sanctions, Iran had a few hundred of centrifuges; after sanctions, Iran reached to 22,000 centrifuges. Before sanctions, Iran had a few hundred kilogram of stockpile of enriched uranium; after sanctions, about 9,000 kilogram. Before sanctions, Iran was enriching below 5 percent; after sanctions, Iran increased the enrichment to 20 percent. Therefore, Congress and Israeli policy for sanctions only led to increased Iranian nuclear and capacity. Until the point which the U.S. recognized Iran has only three months to break out, then the U.S. accepted enrichment in Iran and decided to have verification, transparency, and changed the red line from zero enrichment to zero nuclear bomb.
But the second that I mention of the sanction is on Iranian economy, Iranian people. Definitely, sanctions harmed Iranian economy. Definitely, sanctions harmed Iranian nation. There is no doubt about it. But if the objective of sanctions was limiting Iranian nuclear program, this was 100 percent counterproductive. This is a good lesson for the U.S. Congress and for Israelis. More pressure, more threat, Iran would become more aggressive. But if you go for mutual respect, negotiating with Iran based on mutual respect and based on international rules and regulations, you would find a very, very cooperative and flexible Iran.
AMY GOODMAN : What about what Congress is saying right now? The House speaker, Boehner, as well as the Senate majority leader, McConnell, went to Israel to meet with Netanyahu. They&#8217;re saying they want a say in this. What about these three months? I meam, yesterday John Kerry did not stand with the Iranian foreign minister in making the announcement. They held separate news conferences. What are the chances this deal will be sealed, Ambassador Mousavian?
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : I believe this is for the United States of America, the administration, who resolve its domestic problem. But for Iranians, they are really shocked and surprised, and they do not understand how the U.S. Congress trust a foreign leader, prime minister of Israel, more than its own president, President Obama. This is something Iranians, they really cannot understand, how the Congress has more trust to Israeli prime minister than the president of the United States of America. However, the framework is agreed. The U.S. has—United States of America would be committed to implement it. And domestic issues is something Americans, they have to resolve with themselves. It has nothing to do with Iranians. And Iranians, they would not care about domestic situation of the United States of America.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ambassador Mousavian, I&#8217;d like to ask you about another aspect of this whole issue. In recent months, the key leaders in Saudi Arabia, which obviously considers Iran a chief enemy of it in the region, have raised the possibility that Saudi Arabia itself would begin to seek a atomic bomb, and seeing it as a counterweight to what they perceive as Iran&#8217;s move in that direction. Could you talk about that? And is that just—are those just threats on the part of Saudi Arabia?
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : I think the deal is done with Iran. If Saudi Arabia is going to have a nuclear program, like this deal, that would be fine, because this is the right of every member of Non-Proliferation Treaty to have peaceful nuclear technology for civilian purposes. This deal means no nuclear bomb. This deal means the most powerful, intrusive inspection during the history of proliferation, during the history of nuclear program in last 60, 70 years.
If Saudis, they are ready to accept such a level of transparency, if Saudis, they are ready to have completely open nuclear program, and if they are ready to give all objective guarantees that they would never seek nuclear bomb and they would only go for peaceful nuclear civilian technology, that&#8217;s fine. I think all countries in the Middle East, they can have the same nuclear technology. This is a Non-Proliferation Treaty which already has entitled every member state to have peaceful nuclear technology. But I believe the deal with Iran means a red line to nuclear weapon in the Middle East, and ultimately Israel also should be ready to give up its nuclear weapon in order to have nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.
AMY GOODMAN : Ambassador, I wanted to ask you about a piece that Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, recently wrote. He wrote, quote, &quot;Since the 1979 Iranian revolution that swept out the Washington-supported shah and brought to power an anti-American Islamic leadership, the country has been the most sustained destabilizing force in the Middle East—a sponsor of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, a supporter of Shiite militias that killed American soldiers in Iraq, a patron of Syria&#8217;s government in its bloody civil war, and now a backer of the rebels who pushed out the president of Yemen.&quot; Could you respond to this?
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : See, this is how some Americans, they read Iran. But you should know there is the same reading of some Iranians about the U.S. They believe the U.S. has supported—the U.S. is the source of instability in the Middle East. They believe the U.S. has supported all dictators in the last 60 years. Shah was—Shah of Iran was a corrupted dictator supported by the U.S. Mubarak in Egypt was a corrupted dictator supported by the U.S. Ben Ali in Tunisia was a corrupted dictator supported by U.S. And they have a lot of evidences, even today, many U.S. allies are corrupted and dictator, and there is no human right, no democracy, but they have full support of United States of America. They believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq and made Iraq destabilized. They believe the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, led to expand of terrorism—al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS . They believe Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran, killed 100,000 Iranians, and the U.S. provided material and technology for Saddam Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction against Iranians.
I mean, these are mutual grievances, but we need to change the course. Mistrust is there. Every side has its own reading story and history. But whether we should remain in the past or think about a better future, a new future, a road to peace, a peace between Iranians and Americans, a peace between Washington and Tehran, I believe we should go for the second version. That&#8217;s why I wrote the book, how we can make peace between Iran and the U.S.
These nuclear talks is the first successful direct negotiation between Iran and the U.S. Therefore, this is an excellent precedent. This is excellent experience for Iran and the U.S., first of all, to continue further negotiations on other disputed issues, like terrorism. Iranians, they would say, &quot;Yeah, United States of America founded Taliban. United States of America founded and supported al-Qaeda. They gave all weapons, money to opposition of the Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the terrorist.&quot; I mean, these are the differences. But we need to sit, to discuss the other differences we have on weapons of mass destruction, on terrorism and other issues. However—
AMY GOODMAN : Ambassador, we have to wrap there.
SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN : However, there is—OK. There are a lot of commonalities between Iran and the U.S. Peace and stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, fighting ISIS , security of an energy, these are key commonalities between Iran and the U.S. I believe we should have a dialogue for Iran and the U.S. on the issues of common interests.
AMY GOODMAN : Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, we want to thank you very much for being with us, associate research scholar at Princeton University&#8217;s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, former diplomat who from 1990 to &#39;97 served as Iran&#39;s ambassador to Germany. From &#39;97 to 2005, he was the head of the Foreign Relations Committee of Iran&#39;s National Security Council and served as spokesman for Iran in its nuclear negotiations with the European Union. His book, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir and, most recently, Iran and the United States: An Insider&#8217;s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace . He was speaking to us from Princeton University.
In a moment, we&#8217;ll be joined by George Takei on the new laws in Arkansas and Indiana. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: After eight days of talks in Switzerland, Iran and six world powers have reached a framework agreement on curbing Iran’s nuclear program for at least a decade. In return, the United States and Europe plan to lift economic sanctions against Iran. The parties must now reach a final agreement by June 30. President Obama described the deal as historic.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Today, after many months of tough, principled diplomacy, we have achieved the framework for that deal. And it is a good deal, a deal that meets our core objectives. This framework would cut off every pathway that Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon. Iran will face strict limitations on its program, and Iran has also agreed to the most robust and intrusive inspections and transparency regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program in history. So this deal is not based on trust; it’s based on unprecedented verification.

AMYGOODMAN: As part of the deal, Iran must reduce the number of its centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium into a bomb by more than two-thirds, to about 5,000 or 6,000. Iran also has to redesign a power plant so it cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium, eliminate much of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and be subject to regular international nuclear inspections. The Iranian foreign minister, Javad Zarif, said the deal recognizes Iran’s right to a peaceful nuclear program.

MOHAMMADJAVADZARIF: [translated] The decision we took today is very important, because it forms the basis for a full agreement. We can now begin to prepare a final draft agreement with its relevant clauses based on the solutions that we have reached over the last few days. Iran will be able to continue its peaceful nuclear program, but there will be limitations placed on the level and the duration of its enrichment program and the quantity of enriched material that can be kept.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: While U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the deal would contribute to peace and stability in the region, praise for the deal was not universal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the agreement as, quote, "a threat to Israel’s existence." In Washington, Republican lawmakers are demanding the right to review the deal. Republican Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois said, quote, "Neville Chamberlain got a better deal from Adolf Hitler," referring to the 1930s British prime minister and his policy of Nazi appeasement. On Thursday, President Obama urged Congress not to scuttle the deal.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: If Congress kills this deal, not based on expert analysis and without offering any reasonable alternative, then it’s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy.

AMYGOODMAN: To talk more about the nuclear deal, we’re joined by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator for Iran. He served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany from 1990 to 1997. He’s joining us now from Princeton, New Jersey, where he’s an associate research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Last year, he published the book, Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ambassador Mousavian. Do you see this deal as historic and a road to peace?

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: Good morning. Definitely, the deal is a historic achievement, and, definitely, this is a road to peace, because the deal practically prevented a new war in the Middle East, which could be much more disastrous for the U.S. and for the region compared to the war against Afghanistan and the war on Iraq. I believe diplomacy worked. They have achieved excellent conclusion. And they should continue to reach the final comprehensive deal by end of June, the 1st of July. And then Iran and the U.S., they should negotiate on further disputed issues through diplomacy.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Ambassador Mousavian, could you talk about the key aspects that have been announced of the framework, what you think were the most important, this whole issue of the sharp reduction in the number of centrifuges that Iran will have in operation, and also this issue of the breakout period that’s been discussed?

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: See, for Iranians, two points were important from the day one. The first point was to accept to respect the rights of Iran for peaceful nuclear technology, including enrichment under Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT. This was the first key issue for Iran from the day one, when we negotiated the nuclear—when we began nuclear negotiation in 2003. This deal covers these key demands of Iran. Iran would be entitled to have peaceful nuclear technology.

The second key issue for Iran was lifting the sanctions. This deal also contains, ultimately, lifting all unilateral, multilateral sanctions, nuclear-related sanctions. That’s why I believe the deal is good for Iran, because the two key elements Iran was asking already is covered in the deal.

However, the deal is good for the U.S., for the world powers, because for them the red line was no nuclear bomb, although Iran does not have a nuclear bomb, although there is no evidence of diversion in Iranian nuclear program toward weaponization. However, because of mistrust between Iran and the U.S., Iran and the West, this was a big issue for the U.S. and for the West to make sure any deal would guarantee no diversion on Iranian nuclear program toward weaponization.

This deal contains exactly the key element the U.S. was looking, because, first, Iran has accepted the maximum level of transparency and verification ever during the history of proliferation, even transparency verification measures beyond the current Non-Proliferation Treaty, NPT. Second, with all the limits which you mentioned already, and President Obama also in his statement mentioned, Iran has accepted all confidence-building measures that there would be no breakout and there would be no diversion toward weaponization. As long as the deal covers the maximum level of transparency, all measures on nondiversion toward weaponization, this is a good deal for the U.S., and I told you why the deal is good for Iran.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to Mark Regev, the spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Shortly after the deal was reached, he tweeted, quote, "PM Netanyahu to Pres Obama: A deal based on this framework would threaten the survival of Israel." Regev later appeared on CNN and lambasted the deal as "very dangerous." He suggested Iran will become the next North Korea.

MARKREGEV: We see this deal as very dangerous. We say this deal is a move in the wrong direction. And if this framework actually becomes the basis, the foundation for a final deal with Iran, we see this like the deal with North Korea. I mean, you recall, in the 1990s, North Korea signed a deal that committed themselves to nonproliferation. They kept their nuclear program intact. And when they were ready, they proliferated. They exploded a nuclear device. And today they threaten East Asia. Iran is much, much more dangerous than North Korea.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev speaking on CNN. Your response, Ambassador Mousavian? He said Iran is an existential threat to Israel and that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: I think there is no difference between Israel and North Korea, because North Korea has a few number of nuclear bombs. Israel has about 400 nuclear bombs. Therefore, they both are the same: They have nuclear bombs.

And there is a big difference between Iran and Israel. They really belong to two different worlds on nonproliferation. Iran is member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Israel has never been ready to accept it. There is no evidence in Iranian nuclear program. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb. Israel has about 400 nuclear bombs. During the last 10 years, Iran has given more than 7,000 mandate inspections to International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA. This is completely unprecedented. During the history of IAEA, no other country in the world has given access to IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, like Iran during the last decade. Israel, during last 50, 60 years, has not given even one inspection to the IAEA. Therefore, I believe the world and international community, they should judge who is wrong, who is right. Iran does not have a nuclear bomb. Iran has accepted every level of inspection, transparency. Iran has accepted to have completely open nuclear program. And Israel does have a nuclear bomb, and the country which does have nuclear bomb is blaming Iran, which does not have nuclear bomb.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ambassador Mousavian, I’d like to ask you about the impact that the sanctions have had on the Iranian people and Iranian society over so many years. And also, do you think that the change in government in Iran has made the West, now with President Rouhani, more willing to reach a deal?

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: I believe this is a very, very important question, not because of the nuclear deal, because of the future negotiations between Iran and the U.S. The narrative in the U.S. Congress is the deal is done because of U.S. sanctions and pressures. But the fact is, the deal was signed yesterday, is the principles. The framework is exactly like the principles and frameworks we proposed European countries in 2003 and 2005—between 2003 to 2005, the same principles. Iran was not under sanctions 2003 to 2005. After eight years of sanctions, pressures, the U.S. accepted the same principles. Why the deal was done? Why the deal was possible? There was only and only one reason. In 2003 to 2005, the U.S. was not ready to accept the legitimate rights of Iran under NPT for enrichment. The U.S. was saying the red line is enrichment. Iran cannot have one centrifuges. Iran should have zero enrichment. That’s why we couldn’t make the deal. In 2013, the preliminary deal was signed. The U.S. changed, moderated its position. The U.S. said now Iran can have enrichment under Non-Proliferation Treaty, but limited and for its practical needs. But Iran should give all assurances that it would not seek nuclear bomb. Therefore, really, the reason for the deal was not pressures and sanctions; was the U.S. to realize and to respect the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Second, sanctions had two different impacts. One, on the nuclear issue, sanctions only caused increase of Iranian nuclear program. Before sanctions, Iran had a few hundred of centrifuges; after sanctions, Iran reached to 22,000 centrifuges. Before sanctions, Iran had a few hundred kilogram of stockpile of enriched uranium; after sanctions, about 9,000 kilogram. Before sanctions, Iran was enriching below 5 percent; after sanctions, Iran increased the enrichment to 20 percent. Therefore, Congress and Israeli policy for sanctions only led to increased Iranian nuclear and capacity. Until the point which the U.S. recognized Iran has only three months to break out, then the U.S. accepted enrichment in Iran and decided to have verification, transparency, and changed the red line from zero enrichment to zero nuclear bomb.

But the second that I mention of the sanction is on Iranian economy, Iranian people. Definitely, sanctions harmed Iranian economy. Definitely, sanctions harmed Iranian nation. There is no doubt about it. But if the objective of sanctions was limiting Iranian nuclear program, this was 100 percent counterproductive. This is a good lesson for the U.S. Congress and for Israelis. More pressure, more threat, Iran would become more aggressive. But if you go for mutual respect, negotiating with Iran based on mutual respect and based on international rules and regulations, you would find a very, very cooperative and flexible Iran.

AMYGOODMAN: What about what Congress is saying right now? The House speaker, Boehner, as well as the Senate majority leader, McConnell, went to Israel to meet with Netanyahu. They’re saying they want a say in this. What about these three months? I meam, yesterday John Kerry did not stand with the Iranian foreign minister in making the announcement. They held separate news conferences. What are the chances this deal will be sealed, Ambassador Mousavian?

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: I believe this is for the United States of America, the administration, who resolve its domestic problem. But for Iranians, they are really shocked and surprised, and they do not understand how the U.S. Congress trust a foreign leader, prime minister of Israel, more than its own president, President Obama. This is something Iranians, they really cannot understand, how the Congress has more trust to Israeli prime minister than the president of the United States of America. However, the framework is agreed. The U.S. has—United States of America would be committed to implement it. And domestic issues is something Americans, they have to resolve with themselves. It has nothing to do with Iranians. And Iranians, they would not care about domestic situation of the United States of America.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ambassador Mousavian, I’d like to ask you about another aspect of this whole issue. In recent months, the key leaders in Saudi Arabia, which obviously considers Iran a chief enemy of it in the region, have raised the possibility that Saudi Arabia itself would begin to seek a atomic bomb, and seeing it as a counterweight to what they perceive as Iran’s move in that direction. Could you talk about that? And is that just—are those just threats on the part of Saudi Arabia?

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: I think the deal is done with Iran. If Saudi Arabia is going to have a nuclear program, like this deal, that would be fine, because this is the right of every member of Non-Proliferation Treaty to have peaceful nuclear technology for civilian purposes. This deal means no nuclear bomb. This deal means the most powerful, intrusive inspection during the history of proliferation, during the history of nuclear program in last 60, 70 years.

If Saudis, they are ready to accept such a level of transparency, if Saudis, they are ready to have completely open nuclear program, and if they are ready to give all objective guarantees that they would never seek nuclear bomb and they would only go for peaceful nuclear civilian technology, that’s fine. I think all countries in the Middle East, they can have the same nuclear technology. This is a Non-Proliferation Treaty which already has entitled every member state to have peaceful nuclear technology. But I believe the deal with Iran means a red line to nuclear weapon in the Middle East, and ultimately Israel also should be ready to give up its nuclear weapon in order to have nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East.

AMYGOODMAN: Ambassador, I wanted to ask you about a piece that Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, recently wrote. He wrote, quote, "Since the 1979 Iranian revolution that swept out the Washington-supported shah and brought to power an anti-American Islamic leadership, the country has been the most sustained destabilizing force in the Middle East—a sponsor of the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, a supporter of Shiite militias that killed American soldiers in Iraq, a patron of Syria’s government in its bloody civil war, and now a backer of the rebels who pushed out the president of Yemen." Could you respond to this?

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: See, this is how some Americans, they read Iran. But you should know there is the same reading of some Iranians about the U.S. They believe the U.S. has supported—the U.S. is the source of instability in the Middle East. They believe the U.S. has supported all dictators in the last 60 years. Shah was—Shah of Iran was a corrupted dictator supported by the U.S. Mubarak in Egypt was a corrupted dictator supported by the U.S. Ben Ali in Tunisia was a corrupted dictator supported by U.S. And they have a lot of evidences, even today, many U.S. allies are corrupted and dictator, and there is no human right, no democracy, but they have full support of United States of America. They believe that the U.S. invaded Iraq and made Iraq destabilized. They believe the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, led to expand of terrorism—al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra, ISIS. They believe Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iran, killed 100,000 Iranians, and the U.S. provided material and technology for Saddam Hussein to use weapons of mass destruction against Iranians.

I mean, these are mutual grievances, but we need to change the course. Mistrust is there. Every side has its own reading story and history. But whether we should remain in the past or think about a better future, a new future, a road to peace, a peace between Iranians and Americans, a peace between Washington and Tehran, I believe we should go for the second version. That’s why I wrote the book, how we can make peace between Iran and the U.S.

These nuclear talks is the first successful direct negotiation between Iran and the U.S. Therefore, this is an excellent precedent. This is excellent experience for Iran and the U.S., first of all, to continue further negotiations on other disputed issues, like terrorism. Iranians, they would say, "Yeah, United States of America founded Taliban. United States of America founded and supported al-Qaeda. They gave all weapons, money to opposition of the Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the terrorist." I mean, these are the differences. But we need to sit, to discuss the other differences we have on weapons of mass destruction, on terrorism and other issues. However—

AMYGOODMAN: Ambassador, we have to wrap there.

SEYEDHOSSEINMOUSAVIAN: However, there is—OK. There are a lot of commonalities between Iran and the U.S. Peace and stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, fighting ISIS, security of an energy, these are key commonalities between Iran and the U.S. I believe we should have a dialogue for Iran and the U.S. on the issues of common interests.

AMYGOODMAN: Ambassador Seyed Hossein Mousavian, we want to thank you very much for being with us, associate research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, former diplomat who from 1990 to '97 served as Iran's ambassador to Germany. From '97 to 2005, he was the head of the Foreign Relations Committee of Iran's National Security Council and served as spokesman for Iran in its nuclear negotiations with the European Union. His book, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir and, most recently, Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace. He was speaking to us from Princeton University.

In a moment, we’ll be joined by George Takei on the new laws in Arkansas and Indiana. Stay with us.

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Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400"A Matter of War & Peace": Iran, Powers Near Preliminary Deal in Face of Congress-Israel Oppositionhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/31/a_matter_of_war_peace_iran
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-31:en/story/59e847 AARON MATÉ: We begin in Switzerland, where six days of historic talks over an Iran nuclear deal have reportedly closed. The Associated Press says negotiators will issue a general statement that enough progress has been made to continue in a new phase aimed at a comprehensive agreement in June. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said U.N. sanctions against Iran should be lifted if a nuclear deal is reached.
SERGEY LAVROV : [translated] I think sanctions should be suspended after the agreements are reached. They should be lifted. There are different ways—to lift them completely or first to suspend them temporarily and lift them legally afterwards. But in practice, it should mean that sanctions should be lifted and should not interfere with legal trade and economic activity between Iran and its foreign partners.
AMY GOODMAN : Meanwhile, Congress has vowed to impose additional sanctions if negotiators fail to reach a preliminary deal.
Well, for more we go to Lausanne, Switzerland, where we&#8217;re joined by Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council. He has been following the negotiations closely there. His book is A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama&#8217;s Diplomacy with Iran .
Welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the agreement that has been worked out, Trita, just now?
TRITA PARSI : Frankly, no one can, because the details have not been released. All we know is that AP reports that there&#8217;s going to be a statement about an understanding. And the reason for that is that the Iranians refuse to agree to a two-phase agreement because of bad experience of doing that in 2009. But if it in reality is a political framework or just a mere understanding will be revealed once we have the details, which is scheduled to be released today.
AARON MATÉ: Trita, what was Iran&#8217;s bad experience that you mentioned, and what are you looking for to happen next?
TRITA PARSI : Well, in 2009, on October 1st in Geneva, for the first time, the Iranians and the Americans sat down during the first year of President Obama&#8217;s term, and they discussed the principles of a swap deal. The Iranians agreed, in principle, to a swap deal, and then later on, around the 20th of October, they had a conversation about the details. At that stage, it turned out that the two sides actually had irreconcilable differences when it comes to the details. The narrative that came out of that then was that the Iranians had first agreed and then backtracked. And it was very easy for the West to put the blame on the Iranians, which then later on became a critical component towards imposing new sanctions on Iran. That&#8217;s exactly what the Iranians are trying to avoid here. They don&#8217;t want to agree to anything that is unclear at this point and then, later on, when additional negotiations are taking place, find out that there is a disagreement and then, then, they get the blame for it.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the significance of putting this off? I mean, what does it mean to say it&#8217;s a self-imposed deadline, and what you see as the major sticking points?
TRITA PARSI : Well, I think it&#8217;s important to keep in mind that this deadline of March 31st in reality is primarily an American deadline, because of the pressure that Congress has been putting on the president of the United States. The other actors primarily look at June 30th as the real deadline, mindful of the fact that the interim agreement is valid for another three months. They could have walked away with nothing here, and the interim agreement would still be in place. So, what that means then is that the way that Congress has been putting pressure on the U.S. team has not worked in such a way that the Iranians are pressured. Rather, the pressure is truly on the American side and is adding time pressure on the Americans in a way that the others are not feeling. But nevertheless, it seems like they&#8217;re going to be able to walk away with something that would enable the U.S. team to come back and resist the pressures from Congress. And the next step then would be to continue the negotiations and work out a real framework, a real final deal, with a deadline of June 30th.
AARON MATÉ: Trita, you mentioned the obstacles, or potential obstacles, from Congress. There&#8217;s a measure from Senator Bob Corker that&#8217;s going to come up next month that would give Congress the ability to kill the deal, basically. Do you see that as a significant factor here? Can Congress stop whatever deal might be reached?
TRITA PARSI : Yeah, on April 14th, it&#8217;s scheduled to be marked up in the Senate. This is what is called an oversight bill, but in reality it contains measures that is more of an interference in the negotiations than mere oversight. For instance, the president does not have his suspension rights for sanctions for the first 60 days after a deal is struck in order for the Senate to review the deal. That is actually a direct interference, because what the two sides are negotiating about right now is precisely the schedule of sanctions relief. And if they come to a conclusion on that, and then the Senate says, &quot;No, hold on, we are withdrawing your suspension rights for 60 days,&quot; that is a direct interference that can cause the blame of the collapse of the talks to fall on the U.S. side.
AMY GOODMAN : What has surprised you most, Trita Parsi? You are a very close follower of relations between U.S. and Iran. And, of course, other countries are involved with this, as well—Russia, the foreign minister is just returning.
TRITA PARSI : Well, I think there is something absolutely unique and historic going on here. The P5+1 have their own severe disagreements, and actually conflicts, particularly between the United States and Russia right now, and the EU and Russia. Yet, on this issue, they have managed to keep a tremendous professional unity towards getting some form of an agreement on the nuclear issue. And it shows the importance of finding this agreement, because this truly is a matter of war and peace. And that, I think, casts the opponents in the Senate, or in Israel or elsewhere, as even more isolated, because, frankly, the entire P5+1 is united towards trying to get the same deal that the president of the United States is pursuing.
AMY GOODMAN : Trita Parsi, right now, the speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, has taken a delegation to meet with Netanyahu in Israel. In Lausanne, Josh Block, who is a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC , spokesperson, is—has the Israel Project. What pressure has Israel brought to bear here? Do you think Netanyahu is succeeding in scuttling the talks?
TRITA PARSI : The Israelis have put a tremendous amount of pressure, from the very first minute that President Obama came into office and declared that he wanted to pursue diplomacy. But I would, frankly, say that the Israelis have less influence right now than they could have had, had they played their cards differently. The very, very aggressive tone of Prime Minister Netanyahu, this very clear-cut attempt to try to sabotage the talks, has actually pushed Netanyahu further to the margins and has given him less opportunities to be able to sabotage it. But make no mistake, the Israelis are very much against this deal and are trying to do everything they can to stop it. But there is an air of inevitability right here in Lausanne that something is going to come out of these talks.
AMY GOODMAN : Trita Parsi, we want to thank you for being with us, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council. His book is A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama&#8217;s Diplomacy with Iran . He&#8217;s speaking to us from Lausanne, Switzerland, where the Iran negotiations are taking place. When we come back, we go to Florida. We&#8217;ll be joined by former Senator George Mitchell, who is the former envoy under President Obama to the Middle East. We&#8217;ll talk about Iran and Israel. Stay with us. AARON MATÉ: We begin in Switzerland, where six days of historic talks over an Iran nuclear deal have reportedly closed. The Associated Press says negotiators will issue a general statement that enough progress has been made to continue in a new phase aimed at a comprehensive agreement in June. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said U.N. sanctions against Iran should be lifted if a nuclear deal is reached.

SERGEYLAVROV: [translated] I think sanctions should be suspended after the agreements are reached. They should be lifted. There are different ways—to lift them completely or first to suspend them temporarily and lift them legally afterwards. But in practice, it should mean that sanctions should be lifted and should not interfere with legal trade and economic activity between Iran and its foreign partners.

Well, for more we go to Lausanne, Switzerland, where we’re joined by Trita Parsi, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council. He has been following the negotiations closely there. His book is A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the agreement that has been worked out, Trita, just now?

TRITAPARSI: Frankly, no one can, because the details have not been released. All we know is that AP reports that there’s going to be a statement about an understanding. And the reason for that is that the Iranians refuse to agree to a two-phase agreement because of bad experience of doing that in 2009. But if it in reality is a political framework or just a mere understanding will be revealed once we have the details, which is scheduled to be released today.

AARON MATÉ: Trita, what was Iran’s bad experience that you mentioned, and what are you looking for to happen next?

TRITAPARSI: Well, in 2009, on October 1st in Geneva, for the first time, the Iranians and the Americans sat down during the first year of President Obama’s term, and they discussed the principles of a swap deal. The Iranians agreed, in principle, to a swap deal, and then later on, around the 20th of October, they had a conversation about the details. At that stage, it turned out that the two sides actually had irreconcilable differences when it comes to the details. The narrative that came out of that then was that the Iranians had first agreed and then backtracked. And it was very easy for the West to put the blame on the Iranians, which then later on became a critical component towards imposing new sanctions on Iran. That’s exactly what the Iranians are trying to avoid here. They don’t want to agree to anything that is unclear at this point and then, later on, when additional negotiations are taking place, find out that there is a disagreement and then, then, they get the blame for it.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of putting this off? I mean, what does it mean to say it’s a self-imposed deadline, and what you see as the major sticking points?

TRITAPARSI: Well, I think it’s important to keep in mind that this deadline of March 31st in reality is primarily an American deadline, because of the pressure that Congress has been putting on the president of the United States. The other actors primarily look at June 30th as the real deadline, mindful of the fact that the interim agreement is valid for another three months. They could have walked away with nothing here, and the interim agreement would still be in place. So, what that means then is that the way that Congress has been putting pressure on the U.S. team has not worked in such a way that the Iranians are pressured. Rather, the pressure is truly on the American side and is adding time pressure on the Americans in a way that the others are not feeling. But nevertheless, it seems like they’re going to be able to walk away with something that would enable the U.S. team to come back and resist the pressures from Congress. And the next step then would be to continue the negotiations and work out a real framework, a real final deal, with a deadline of June 30th.

AARON MATÉ: Trita, you mentioned the obstacles, or potential obstacles, from Congress. There’s a measure from Senator Bob Corker that’s going to come up next month that would give Congress the ability to kill the deal, basically. Do you see that as a significant factor here? Can Congress stop whatever deal might be reached?

TRITAPARSI: Yeah, on April 14th, it’s scheduled to be marked up in the Senate. This is what is called an oversight bill, but in reality it contains measures that is more of an interference in the negotiations than mere oversight. For instance, the president does not have his suspension rights for sanctions for the first 60 days after a deal is struck in order for the Senate to review the deal. That is actually a direct interference, because what the two sides are negotiating about right now is precisely the schedule of sanctions relief. And if they come to a conclusion on that, and then the Senate says, "No, hold on, we are withdrawing your suspension rights for 60 days," that is a direct interference that can cause the blame of the collapse of the talks to fall on the U.S. side.

AMYGOODMAN: What has surprised you most, Trita Parsi? You are a very close follower of relations between U.S. and Iran. And, of course, other countries are involved with this, as well—Russia, the foreign minister is just returning.

TRITAPARSI: Well, I think there is something absolutely unique and historic going on here. The P5+1 have their own severe disagreements, and actually conflicts, particularly between the United States and Russia right now, and the EU and Russia. Yet, on this issue, they have managed to keep a tremendous professional unity towards getting some form of an agreement on the nuclear issue. And it shows the importance of finding this agreement, because this truly is a matter of war and peace. And that, I think, casts the opponents in the Senate, or in Israel or elsewhere, as even more isolated, because, frankly, the entire P5+1 is united towards trying to get the same deal that the president of the United States is pursuing.

AMYGOODMAN: Trita Parsi, right now, the speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, has taken a delegation to meet with Netanyahu in Israel. In Lausanne, Josh Block, who is a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, spokesperson, is—has the Israel Project. What pressure has Israel brought to bear here? Do you think Netanyahu is succeeding in scuttling the talks?

TRITAPARSI: The Israelis have put a tremendous amount of pressure, from the very first minute that President Obama came into office and declared that he wanted to pursue diplomacy. But I would, frankly, say that the Israelis have less influence right now than they could have had, had they played their cards differently. The very, very aggressive tone of Prime Minister Netanyahu, this very clear-cut attempt to try to sabotage the talks, has actually pushed Netanyahu further to the margins and has given him less opportunities to be able to sabotage it. But make no mistake, the Israelis are very much against this deal and are trying to do everything they can to stop it. But there is an air of inevitability right here in Lausanne that something is going to come out of these talks.

AMYGOODMAN: Trita Parsi, we want to thank you for being with us, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council. His book is A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran. He’s speaking to us from Lausanne, Switzerland, where the Iran negotiations are taking place. When we come back, we go to Florida. We’ll be joined by former Senator George Mitchell, who is the former envoy under President Obama to the Middle East. We’ll talk about Iran and Israel. Stay with us.

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Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400Former Mideast Peace Envoy George Mitchell on U.S.-Israel Showdown over Iran, Palestinian Statehoodhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/31/former_mideast_peace_envoy_george_mitchell
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-31:en/story/2caf10 AARON MATÉ: As historic talks over an Iran nuclear deal have reportedly closed ahead of a U.S.-imposed deadline, the Israeli government continues to oppose a deal. Last week, it emerged Israeli intelligence spied on the Iran talks and then fed the information to congressional Republicans. Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the deal&#8217;s proposed terms are even worse than he thought. Speaking on Sunday, Netanyahu appeared to invoke the &quot;axis of evil&quot; moniker used by President George W. Bush for Iran, Iraq and North Korea. But Netanyahu offered a new variation on the axis members.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU : [translated] I expressed our deep concern toward this deal emerging with the Iran nuclear talks. This deal, as it appears to be emerging, bears out all of our fears, and even more than that. The Iran-Lausanne-Yemen axis is very dangerous to humanity, and this must be stopped.
AARON MATÉ: The Lausanne in that axis refers to the Swiss town where the nuclear talks are taking place. That apparently puts the U.S. inside the axis that Netanyahu opposes, along with the five other world powers negotiating with Iran.
AMY GOODMAN : Netanyahu&#8217;s comment was the latest in an escalating standoff with the White House over Middle East policy. President Obama and other top officials have vowed to re-evaluate their approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict following Netanyahu&#8217;s open rejection of a two-state solution. U.S. officials have suggested they might take steps including no longer vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. Some predict a major shift in U.S. policy. A headline in The Washington Post describes it as, quote, &quot;Obama&#8217;s next earthquake.&quot; And the first test of the new U.S. approach might come in the next few weeks. France will put forward a U.N. Security Council measure aimed at encouraging peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The measure would include parameters for negotiations, presumably based on an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state there.
For more, we go to a guest who&#8217;s been deeply involved in U.S. efforts to seek a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. Senator George Mitchell served as U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace under President Obama from 2009 to 2011. He previously served under President Bill Clinton as the special envoy for Northern Ireland, where he helped broker the Belfast Peace Agreement of 1998. Before that, Senator Mitchell served as Democratic senator from Maine for 15 years, including as Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995.
Welcome to Democracy Now! , Senator Mitchell. Let us start on this issue of proposed measures President Obama and the administration is considering possibly against Israel, particularly what might happen in the United Nations.
GEORGE MITCHELL : Well, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s possible to know. I doubt very much that any decision finally has been made within the White House. I think it&#8217;s all under review, as the president has said. It will depend, obviously, in part on the circumstances that exist at the time any such resolution is introduced at the United Nations, what the language of the resolution is, what the reaction both within the United States and among our allies is. I do think that the president is appropriately reviewing our policies, given the developments of the past few weeks, particularly the various statements of Prime Minister Netanyahu. But I don&#8217;t think anyone should draw any final conclusion from the discussions that are now underway, particularly since we don&#8217;t yet know what&#8217;s going to happen with the talks with Iran, which is obviously a major factor.
AARON MATÉ: But, Senator Mitchell, can we agree that this would be a major shift if the U.S. starts supporting or not blocking critical measures at the U.N.? I want to go first to a clip from U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Speaking about a year ago, she said the U.S. will continue to block Palestinian efforts in forums like the U.N.
AMBASSADOR SAMANTHA POWER : There are no shortcuts to statehood, and we&#8217;ve made that clear. Efforts that attempt to circumvent the peace process, the hard slog of the peace process, are only going to be counterproductive to the peace process itself and to the ultimate objective of securing statehood, the objective that the Palestinian Authority, of course, has. So, we have contested every effort, even prior to the restart of negotiations spearheaded by Secretary Kerry. Every time the Palestinians have sought to make a move on a U.N. agency, a treaty, etc., we have opposed it.
AARON MATÉ: Power went on to say that trying to, quote, &quot;deter Palestinian action is what we do all the time and what we will continue to do.&quot; Now, that was a year ago. Now things are different, Senator Mitchell. Can you talk about why the U.S. was previously blocking resolutions such as simply criticizing the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories?
GEORGE MITCHELL : It has been, for many decades, under presidents of both parties, U.S. policy that the differences between Israelis and Palestinians should be resolved in direct negotiations between the parties, with the support and assistance of the United States and other allies. And as a necessary corollary to that, U.S. policy has been that the issues should not be resolved outside of direct negotiations. And so, unilateral action by either side to bring about a change that would alter the circumstances on the ground, or that would resolve an issue unilaterally that should be resolved in negotiations, were to be resisted. That is why the United States has consistently, publicly opposed Israel&#8217;s policies and actions regarding settlements, even as it has opposed publicly Palestinian efforts to resolve other issues outside of direct negotiations. So, American policy has been clearly consistent.
What is different now, of course, is that is all premised on the basis that there will be a direct negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians to achieve the goals that each seeks—security for Israel and its people, and a state for the Palestinian people. The reason that circumstances have changed now is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the day before his election, said that there would not be a Palestinian state while he was prime minister. That, effectively, undermined the principle of American policy, of what our objectives would be. The next day, he appeared to walk back from that, and so there is now some question about policy in that regard, and I think that is what has led to the review that you described earlier.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn to William Quandt, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Carter and Nixon. At a recent event, he suggested the U.S. needs to impose a cost on Israel for maintaining the occupation.
WILLIAM QUANDT : What doesn&#8217;t work is just saying, &quot;You know what needs to be done, but there are no consequences if you don&#8217;t do it.&quot; And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done in the past, you know. And we use language that, if I were to try to translate it, I wouldn&#8217;t know what to say. We say the illegitimacy of continued settlement activity, but we don&#8217;t say that the settlements are illegal.
AMY GOODMAN : So, that&#8217;s William Quandt, a former National Security Council official, saying the status quo simply doesn&#8217;t work. Your response to this, Senator George Mitchell? And also, if you could respond to the other controversial statement, to say the least, of what Netanyahu said on that day of the elections, concerned about the Arab vote that was turning out?
GEORGE MITCHELL : Well, he has apologized for that, and so I think that&#8217;s a separate issue from the first one that you described.
The fact is, of course, that both sides have, for a very long time, urged that the United States impose consequences on the other side. Both regard that as the way to resolve the issue. Palestinians and many Arabs repeatedly told me in meetings that the way to get this issue solved is for the United States to cut off all aid to Israel. &quot;They&#8217;re dependent on you,&quot; they said, &quot;and if you cut off all aid, they&#8217;ll do what you want.&quot; The Israelis, on the other hand, make exactly the same statement regarding aid to Palestinians. &quot;They&#8217;re dependent on you,&quot; they told me, &quot;and if you will just cut off all aid to the Palestinians, they&#8217;ll do what you want.&quot;
In my judgment, neither of those options is viable or would work. Israel is a democracy, a vibrant democracy. They are a proud and sovereign people. And taking punitive action, I think, would be, first, inappropriate, because of our close relationship to them, and secondly, I think it would be counterproductive. I do not think it would produce the desired result. It would further isolate the relations—further separate the relations between the two parties and reduce American influence there. And I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s helpful in what we want, is the objective of a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians and, equally important, normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, most of whom are also allies with the United States and who, paradoxically and somewhat ironically, are aligned with Israel on the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons. There is no stronger supporter of the position that Prime Minister Netanyahu is taking on the Iran nuclear deal than the government of Saudi Arabia, for example, which disagrees with Israel on other issues. So, it&#8217;s complicated. It&#8217;s difficult.
There is a powerful temptation to resort to, &quot;Well, if we just do this, they&#8217;ll do that, and if we take this action, they&#8217;ll take that action.&quot; I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s the case. I think, ultimately, there has to be a discussion between the parties, with the strong support of the United States to achieve the mutually beneficial objectives. Israel has a state. They don&#8217;t have security. They want it, and they deserve it. The Palestinians don&#8217;t have a state. They want one, and they deserve one. Israel is not going to get security until the Palestinians get a state, and the Palestinians are not going to get a state until the people of Israel have a reasonable and sustainable degree of security. It is in their mutually beneficial interest to reach agreement. And I think, over time, that&#8217;s going to become clear to the public on both sides, as well as important not to leave out of the discussion, following that, the normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors, its Gulf Arab neighbors in the region, which would be beneficial to all concerned.
AARON MATÉ: But, Senator, if we&#8217;re talking about taking punitive measures, can we agree that the two parties are not equal? They&#8217;re not occupying each other. It&#8217;s Israel that&#8217;s been occupying the Palestinians for nearly 50 years. They have nuclear weapons. They&#8217;re a huge power. Even during the so-called peace process, the settlements have expanded massively. So, Palestinians can say, &quot;Well, look, I mean, the status quo of 50 years simply has not worked. Israel, Israel&#8217;s largest—the U.S., Israel&#8217;s largest supporter, has to change its policy decisively.&quot;
GEORGE MITCHELL : Well, it is true that the parties are not equal, of course. And one reason for having outside participation in the process is to provide an independent interlocutor, someone who would assist the parties in reaching agreement. And despite the criticism of the United States by many, there is in fact no other entity in the world that can perform that task other than the United States government. No other entity can create the circumstances, the conditions, the follow-up that is necessary for these agreements. And so, we do have an important role to play. We can play it.
We are, and will continue to be, close friends, allies and supporters of the people of Israel. That doesn&#8217;t mean that we agree with the government of Israel on every issue, and surely, the disagreements between the United States and Israel in recent weeks have been very well documented and displayed for all the world to see. At the same time, we support a Palestinian state. President George W. Bush set that out very persuasively and comprehensively in several speeches, including one he made in Jerusalem in January of 2009.
So, I think that the United States can and must play a central role in bringing about an agreement and, most importantly, seeing that an agreement is adhered to over time. And I think that&#8217;s the role we&#8217;re going to play. I think they will come around to it on both sides. I don&#8217;t think that we should say it is somehow our role to take punitive action against Israel so as to try to equal the status between them and the Palestinians. That wouldn&#8217;t work, and I don&#8217;t think it would achieve the desired objective.
AMY GOODMAN : Ahead of a trip to Israel this week, House Speaker John Boehner called President Obama&#8217;s recent criticism of Netanyahu reprehensible. Speaking to CNN , the House speaker also suggested it&#8217;s the fault of the Obama administration that Netanyahu has rejected Palestinian statehood.
SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER : I think the animosity exhibited by our administration toward the prime minister of Israel is reprehensible. And I think that the pressure that they&#8217;ve put on him over the last four or five years has, frankly, pushed him to the point where he had to speak up. I don&#8217;t blame him at all for speaking up.
AMY GOODMAN : I&#8217;d like you to respond to the House speaker, the Republican leadership siding with Netanyahu, a foreign prime minister, over President Obama.
GEORGE MITCHELL : Well, I don&#8217;t agree with Speaker Boehner on either of the points that he made. Of course, there&#8217;s a long history in the United States, which is an open, vibrant democracy, of people disagreeing with the president. That&#8217;s what is essential to democracy, that the absence of support for government policies at any given time is not evidence of a lack of patriotism. It&#8217;s essential to our free system. On the particular issues that Speaker Boehner has just described, while I fully respect his right to express his view, I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the conclusions that he reached, that somehow it&#8217;s President Obama&#8217;s fault that Prime Minister Netanyahu has made differing statements with respect to a Palestinian state.
AARON MATÉ: And, Senator, should peace talks ever resume, what do you see as the major sticking points that might prove to be an obstacle to talks? And do you have any ideas for what solutions could be introduced?
GEORGE MITCHELL : Well, all of the issues are sticking points. There are no easy issues in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. They&#8217;re all important—where the borders would be; the distribution and rights with respect to water, which is a crucial issue in that region of the world, and, of course, in other parts of the world; the status of the right of return of Palestinians; the issue of Jerusalem, whether it should be the capital of both countries or not. And so, you have a whole range of very, very difficult issues, but, in my judgment, all of which can be resolved if there is a basis of trust between the two parties.
This discussion has been long and complicated, but it hasn&#8217;t mentioned what, in my judgment, is the single most important issue, and it is the high level of mistrust between both societies and both leaders. Having had long experience in the region, having met many, many times with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his predecessors, and President Abbas and his predecessor, I think that&#8217;s the single most difficult issue. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in my opinion, does not believe that President Abbas has either the will or the capacity, personal or political strength, to reach agreement and push one through to approval and implementation. President Abbas, on the other hand, does not believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is serious about getting an agreement.
When Prime Minister Netanyahu announced in June of 2009 that he favored a two-state solution, no Palestinians believed that he was telling the truth, and neither did any other Arabs. They thought he was saying that just to accommodate the pressure from the United States. As Speaker Boehner has suggested, this is really the reverse side of that argument. And so, when Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the day before the recent election, said that there wouldn&#8217;t be a state, all of the Arabs reacted with &quot;I told you so. We didn&#8217;t believe him in the first place.&quot; And then, of course, when he appeared to walk back from that on the following day, that just furthered the impression of mistrust on the part of the Palestinians and the Arabs.
So, at the root cause of this is that you have two leaders who do not believe that the other has the intent, sincerity or capability to reach an agreement, and are therefore reluctant to take any steps that would impose a political cost on them within their societies, because both societies are divided. Prime Minister Netanyahu just got elected, so he represents the democratic result of a free and open election in Israel and the strong sentiment among his party and his supporters not there ever to be—for there not ever to be a Palestinian state on the West Bank. On the other hand, there are many Israelis who favor a two-state solution. On the Palestinian side, it&#8217;s about 50-50. You have Fatah, the principal party of the Palestinian Authority, headed by the President Abbas, who favor a two-state solution and who favor peaceful, nonviolent negotiation to get there. On the other hand, Hamas, about half, and centered primarily in Gaza, who are opposed to an Israeli state, who are opposed to—who want to retain the right to use violence to end the occupation, as they say. And so, both sides are divided. And if any leader takes a—makes a concession, he gets domestic political criticism. Well, if you don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s ever going to be an agreement because the other guy is not sincere, you&#8217;re not willing to take steps to move in that direction. That&#8217;s at the core of this problem, and I think that&#8217;s what has to be overcome.
AARON MATÉ: But, Senator, on the issue of Hamas, first of all, they were elected in 2006, so they are a legitimate government in Gaza, whether or not the U.S. and Israel like them or not, but Israel won&#8217;t deal with them. But also, on the issue of even Israeli and Palestinian statehood, hasn&#8217;t Hamas basically tacitly accepted Israel&#8217;s right to exist within its &#39;67 borders, because Hamas has said, &quot;We would accept a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories.&quot; In doing so, you&#39;re basically saying that &quot;we recognize Israel, even if we don&#8217;t directly do it.&quot;
GEORGE MITCHELL : Well, first off, they won a parliamentary election. Their government is divided into an executive and a parliament. They didn&#8217;t win the presidency. What was at stake was the parliamentary election. President Abbas remained the democratically elected leader of the country. They then, in a violent uprising, defeated the forces of President Abbas and Fatah, and evicted them from Gaza and seized both executive and parliamentary control in Gaza. So let&#8217;s be clear about that. They didn&#8217;t win control of Gaza in an election. They won control of Gaza in a military action, which expelled the forces of the Palestinian Authority.
Secondly, Hamas has prevented any election from occurring since then. They have the interesting political approach of they criticize Abbas as being illegitimate because he hasn&#8217;t been re-elected since his term expired. The reason he hasn&#8217;t been re-elected is that they won&#8217;t permit an election to occur in Gaza. And there are questions about whether an election could occur in Jerusalem, as well.
So, secondly, on the issue of the Hamas and Israel, you say &quot;tacitly.&quot; Well, if you were an Israeli, someone says, &quot;Well, look, I&#8217;ll do this tacitly, but I won&#8217;t do it explicitly,&quot; you&#8217;d be suspicious. And the Israelis rightly are, that they say, not—Hamas doesn&#8217;t say, &quot;We tacitly recognize Israel.&quot; Other people say it, as you have said it. Hamas says, &quot;We&#8217;re against Israel.&quot; So, I think you have to be very careful about implying a belief in someone who states the opposite, and rather, I think, you should rely on their actions. And so, I have always felt that if we could get a real talk going between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis, that had a serious basis for proceeding, that&#8217;s the best way to draw Hamas in and get them to reverse their positions that now represent the impediment to their participation. AARON MATÉ: As historic talks over an Iran nuclear deal have reportedly closed ahead of a U.S.-imposed deadline, the Israeli government continues to oppose a deal. Last week, it emerged Israeli intelligence spied on the Iran talks and then fed the information to congressional Republicans. Now, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the deal’s proposed terms are even worse than he thought. Speaking on Sunday, Netanyahu appeared to invoke the "axis of evil" moniker used by President George W. Bush for Iran, Iraq and North Korea. But Netanyahu offered a new variation on the axis members.

PRIMEMINISTERBENJAMINNETANYAHU: [translated] I expressed our deep concern toward this deal emerging with the Iran nuclear talks. This deal, as it appears to be emerging, bears out all of our fears, and even more than that. The Iran-Lausanne-Yemen axis is very dangerous to humanity, and this must be stopped.

AARON MATÉ: The Lausanne in that axis refers to the Swiss town where the nuclear talks are taking place. That apparently puts the U.S. inside the axis that Netanyahu opposes, along with the five other world powers negotiating with Iran.

AMYGOODMAN: Netanyahu’s comment was the latest in an escalating standoff with the White House over Middle East policy. President Obama and other top officials have vowed to re-evaluate their approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict following Netanyahu’s open rejection of a two-state solution. U.S. officials have suggested they might take steps including no longer vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. Some predict a major shift in U.S. policy. A headline in The Washington Post describes it as, quote, "Obama’s next earthquake." And the first test of the new U.S. approach might come in the next few weeks. France will put forward a U.N. Security Council measure aimed at encouraging peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The measure would include parameters for negotiations, presumably based on an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state there.

For more, we go to a guest who’s been deeply involved in U.S. efforts to seek a peace deal between Israel and Palestine. Senator George Mitchell served as U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace under President Obama from 2009 to 2011. He previously served under President Bill Clinton as the special envoy for Northern Ireland, where he helped broker the Belfast Peace Agreement of 1998. Before that, Senator Mitchell served as Democratic senator from Maine for 15 years, including as Senate Majority Leader from 1989 to 1995.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Senator Mitchell. Let us start on this issue of proposed measures President Obama and the administration is considering possibly against Israel, particularly what might happen in the United Nations.

GEORGEMITCHELL: Well, I don’t think it’s possible to know. I doubt very much that any decision finally has been made within the White House. I think it’s all under review, as the president has said. It will depend, obviously, in part on the circumstances that exist at the time any such resolution is introduced at the United Nations, what the language of the resolution is, what the reaction both within the United States and among our allies is. I do think that the president is appropriately reviewing our policies, given the developments of the past few weeks, particularly the various statements of Prime Minister Netanyahu. But I don’t think anyone should draw any final conclusion from the discussions that are now underway, particularly since we don’t yet know what’s going to happen with the talks with Iran, which is obviously a major factor.

AARON MATÉ: But, Senator Mitchell, can we agree that this would be a major shift if the U.S. starts supporting or not blocking critical measures at the U.N.? I want to go first to a clip from U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power. Speaking about a year ago, she said the U.S. will continue to block Palestinian efforts in forums like the U.N.

AMBASSADORSAMANTHAPOWER: There are no shortcuts to statehood, and we’ve made that clear. Efforts that attempt to circumvent the peace process, the hard slog of the peace process, are only going to be counterproductive to the peace process itself and to the ultimate objective of securing statehood, the objective that the Palestinian Authority, of course, has. So, we have contested every effort, even prior to the restart of negotiations spearheaded by Secretary Kerry. Every time the Palestinians have sought to make a move on a U.N. agency, a treaty, etc., we have opposed it.

AARON MATÉ: Power went on to say that trying to, quote, "deter Palestinian action is what we do all the time and what we will continue to do." Now, that was a year ago. Now things are different, Senator Mitchell. Can you talk about why the U.S. was previously blocking resolutions such as simply criticizing the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories?

GEORGEMITCHELL: It has been, for many decades, under presidents of both parties, U.S. policy that the differences between Israelis and Palestinians should be resolved in direct negotiations between the parties, with the support and assistance of the United States and other allies. And as a necessary corollary to that, U.S. policy has been that the issues should not be resolved outside of direct negotiations. And so, unilateral action by either side to bring about a change that would alter the circumstances on the ground, or that would resolve an issue unilaterally that should be resolved in negotiations, were to be resisted. That is why the United States has consistently, publicly opposed Israel’s policies and actions regarding settlements, even as it has opposed publicly Palestinian efforts to resolve other issues outside of direct negotiations. So, American policy has been clearly consistent.

What is different now, of course, is that is all premised on the basis that there will be a direct negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians to achieve the goals that each seeks—security for Israel and its people, and a state for the Palestinian people. The reason that circumstances have changed now is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the day before his election, said that there would not be a Palestinian state while he was prime minister. That, effectively, undermined the principle of American policy, of what our objectives would be. The next day, he appeared to walk back from that, and so there is now some question about policy in that regard, and I think that is what has led to the review that you described earlier.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn to William Quandt, who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Carter and Nixon. At a recent event, he suggested the U.S. needs to impose a cost on Israel for maintaining the occupation.

WILLIAMQUANDT: What doesn’t work is just saying, "You know what needs to be done, but there are no consequences if you don’t do it." And that’s what we’ve done in the past, you know. And we use language that, if I were to try to translate it, I wouldn’t know what to say. We say the illegitimacy of continued settlement activity, but we don’t say that the settlements are illegal.

AMYGOODMAN: So, that’s William Quandt, a former National Security Council official, saying the status quo simply doesn’t work. Your response to this, Senator George Mitchell? And also, if you could respond to the other controversial statement, to say the least, of what Netanyahu said on that day of the elections, concerned about the Arab vote that was turning out?

GEORGEMITCHELL: Well, he has apologized for that, and so I think that’s a separate issue from the first one that you described.

The fact is, of course, that both sides have, for a very long time, urged that the United States impose consequences on the other side. Both regard that as the way to resolve the issue. Palestinians and many Arabs repeatedly told me in meetings that the way to get this issue solved is for the United States to cut off all aid to Israel. "They’re dependent on you," they said, "and if you cut off all aid, they’ll do what you want." The Israelis, on the other hand, make exactly the same statement regarding aid to Palestinians. "They’re dependent on you," they told me, "and if you will just cut off all aid to the Palestinians, they’ll do what you want."

In my judgment, neither of those options is viable or would work. Israel is a democracy, a vibrant democracy. They are a proud and sovereign people. And taking punitive action, I think, would be, first, inappropriate, because of our close relationship to them, and secondly, I think it would be counterproductive. I do not think it would produce the desired result. It would further isolate the relations—further separate the relations between the two parties and reduce American influence there. And I don’t think that’s helpful in what we want, is the objective of a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians and, equally important, normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, most of whom are also allies with the United States and who, paradoxically and somewhat ironically, are aligned with Israel on the issue of Iran and nuclear weapons. There is no stronger supporter of the position that Prime Minister Netanyahu is taking on the Iran nuclear deal than the government of Saudi Arabia, for example, which disagrees with Israel on other issues. So, it’s complicated. It’s difficult.

There is a powerful temptation to resort to, "Well, if we just do this, they’ll do that, and if we take this action, they’ll take that action." I don’t think that’s the case. I think, ultimately, there has to be a discussion between the parties, with the strong support of the United States to achieve the mutually beneficial objectives. Israel has a state. They don’t have security. They want it, and they deserve it. The Palestinians don’t have a state. They want one, and they deserve one. Israel is not going to get security until the Palestinians get a state, and the Palestinians are not going to get a state until the people of Israel have a reasonable and sustainable degree of security. It is in their mutually beneficial interest to reach agreement. And I think, over time, that’s going to become clear to the public on both sides, as well as important not to leave out of the discussion, following that, the normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors, its Gulf Arab neighbors in the region, which would be beneficial to all concerned.

AARON MATÉ: But, Senator, if we’re talking about taking punitive measures, can we agree that the two parties are not equal? They’re not occupying each other. It’s Israel that’s been occupying the Palestinians for nearly 50 years. They have nuclear weapons. They’re a huge power. Even during the so-called peace process, the settlements have expanded massively. So, Palestinians can say, "Well, look, I mean, the status quo of 50 years simply has not worked. Israel, Israel’s largest—the U.S., Israel’s largest supporter, has to change its policy decisively."

GEORGEMITCHELL: Well, it is true that the parties are not equal, of course. And one reason for having outside participation in the process is to provide an independent interlocutor, someone who would assist the parties in reaching agreement. And despite the criticism of the United States by many, there is in fact no other entity in the world that can perform that task other than the United States government. No other entity can create the circumstances, the conditions, the follow-up that is necessary for these agreements. And so, we do have an important role to play. We can play it.

We are, and will continue to be, close friends, allies and supporters of the people of Israel. That doesn’t mean that we agree with the government of Israel on every issue, and surely, the disagreements between the United States and Israel in recent weeks have been very well documented and displayed for all the world to see. At the same time, we support a Palestinian state. President George W. Bush set that out very persuasively and comprehensively in several speeches, including one he made in Jerusalem in January of 2009.

So, I think that the United States can and must play a central role in bringing about an agreement and, most importantly, seeing that an agreement is adhered to over time. And I think that’s the role we’re going to play. I think they will come around to it on both sides. I don’t think that we should say it is somehow our role to take punitive action against Israel so as to try to equal the status between them and the Palestinians. That wouldn’t work, and I don’t think it would achieve the desired objective.

AMYGOODMAN: Ahead of a trip to Israel this week, House Speaker John Boehner called President Obama’s recent criticism of Netanyahu reprehensible. Speaking to CNN, the House speaker also suggested it’s the fault of the Obama administration that Netanyahu has rejected Palestinian statehood.

SPEAKERJOHNBOEHNER: I think the animosity exhibited by our administration toward the prime minister of Israel is reprehensible. And I think that the pressure that they’ve put on him over the last four or five years has, frankly, pushed him to the point where he had to speak up. I don’t blame him at all for speaking up.

AMYGOODMAN: I’d like you to respond to the House speaker, the Republican leadership siding with Netanyahu, a foreign prime minister, over President Obama.

GEORGEMITCHELL: Well, I don’t agree with Speaker Boehner on either of the points that he made. Of course, there’s a long history in the United States, which is an open, vibrant democracy, of people disagreeing with the president. That’s what is essential to democracy, that the absence of support for government policies at any given time is not evidence of a lack of patriotism. It’s essential to our free system. On the particular issues that Speaker Boehner has just described, while I fully respect his right to express his view, I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the conclusions that he reached, that somehow it’s President Obama’s fault that Prime Minister Netanyahu has made differing statements with respect to a Palestinian state.

AARON MATÉ: And, Senator, should peace talks ever resume, what do you see as the major sticking points that might prove to be an obstacle to talks? And do you have any ideas for what solutions could be introduced?

GEORGEMITCHELL: Well, all of the issues are sticking points. There are no easy issues in the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. They’re all important—where the borders would be; the distribution and rights with respect to water, which is a crucial issue in that region of the world, and, of course, in other parts of the world; the status of the right of return of Palestinians; the issue of Jerusalem, whether it should be the capital of both countries or not. And so, you have a whole range of very, very difficult issues, but, in my judgment, all of which can be resolved if there is a basis of trust between the two parties.

This discussion has been long and complicated, but it hasn’t mentioned what, in my judgment, is the single most important issue, and it is the high level of mistrust between both societies and both leaders. Having had long experience in the region, having met many, many times with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his predecessors, and President Abbas and his predecessor, I think that’s the single most difficult issue. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in my opinion, does not believe that President Abbas has either the will or the capacity, personal or political strength, to reach agreement and push one through to approval and implementation. President Abbas, on the other hand, does not believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is serious about getting an agreement.

When Prime Minister Netanyahu announced in June of 2009 that he favored a two-state solution, no Palestinians believed that he was telling the truth, and neither did any other Arabs. They thought he was saying that just to accommodate the pressure from the United States. As Speaker Boehner has suggested, this is really the reverse side of that argument. And so, when Prime Minister Netanyahu, on the day before the recent election, said that there wouldn’t be a state, all of the Arabs reacted with "I told you so. We didn’t believe him in the first place." And then, of course, when he appeared to walk back from that on the following day, that just furthered the impression of mistrust on the part of the Palestinians and the Arabs.

So, at the root cause of this is that you have two leaders who do not believe that the other has the intent, sincerity or capability to reach an agreement, and are therefore reluctant to take any steps that would impose a political cost on them within their societies, because both societies are divided. Prime Minister Netanyahu just got elected, so he represents the democratic result of a free and open election in Israel and the strong sentiment among his party and his supporters not there ever to be—for there not ever to be a Palestinian state on the West Bank. On the other hand, there are many Israelis who favor a two-state solution. On the Palestinian side, it’s about 50-50. You have Fatah, the principal party of the Palestinian Authority, headed by the President Abbas, who favor a two-state solution and who favor peaceful, nonviolent negotiation to get there. On the other hand, Hamas, about half, and centered primarily in Gaza, who are opposed to an Israeli state, who are opposed to—who want to retain the right to use violence to end the occupation, as they say. And so, both sides are divided. And if any leader takes a—makes a concession, he gets domestic political criticism. Well, if you don’t think there’s ever going to be an agreement because the other guy is not sincere, you’re not willing to take steps to move in that direction. That’s at the core of this problem, and I think that’s what has to be overcome.

AARON MATÉ: But, Senator, on the issue of Hamas, first of all, they were elected in 2006, so they are a legitimate government in Gaza, whether or not the U.S. and Israel like them or not, but Israel won’t deal with them. But also, on the issue of even Israeli and Palestinian statehood, hasn’t Hamas basically tacitly accepted Israel’s right to exist within its '67 borders, because Hamas has said, "We would accept a Palestinian state in the Occupied Territories." In doing so, you're basically saying that "we recognize Israel, even if we don’t directly do it."

GEORGEMITCHELL: Well, first off, they won a parliamentary election. Their government is divided into an executive and a parliament. They didn’t win the presidency. What was at stake was the parliamentary election. President Abbas remained the democratically elected leader of the country. They then, in a violent uprising, defeated the forces of President Abbas and Fatah, and evicted them from Gaza and seized both executive and parliamentary control in Gaza. So let’s be clear about that. They didn’t win control of Gaza in an election. They won control of Gaza in a military action, which expelled the forces of the Palestinian Authority.

Secondly, Hamas has prevented any election from occurring since then. They have the interesting political approach of they criticize Abbas as being illegitimate because he hasn’t been re-elected since his term expired. The reason he hasn’t been re-elected is that they won’t permit an election to occur in Gaza. And there are questions about whether an election could occur in Jerusalem, as well.

So, secondly, on the issue of the Hamas and Israel, you say "tacitly." Well, if you were an Israeli, someone says, "Well, look, I’ll do this tacitly, but I won’t do it explicitly," you’d be suspicious. And the Israelis rightly are, that they say, not—Hamas doesn’t say, "We tacitly recognize Israel." Other people say it, as you have said it. Hamas says, "We’re against Israel." So, I think you have to be very careful about implying a belief in someone who states the opposite, and rather, I think, you should rely on their actions. And so, I have always felt that if we could get a real talk going between the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis, that had a serious basis for proceeding, that’s the best way to draw Hamas in and get them to reverse their positions that now represent the impediment to their participation.

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Tue, 31 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400The Yemen Crisis: Could Domestic Conflict Grow into Protracted Regional War?http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/27/the_yemen_crisis_could_domestic_conflict
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-27:en/story/9b4d2e AMY GOODMAN : To talk more about Yemen and the Saudi-led bombing campaign, we&#8217;re joined by two guests in London. Iona Craig is back with us, journalist who was based in Sana&#8217;a for four years as Yemen correspondent for The Times of London, awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014. And Brian Whitaker is with us, former Middle East editor for The Guardian . He now runs the website Al-Bab.com , which covers Arab politics and society, where he wrote a new report on &quot;Yemen and Saudi Arabia: A Historical Review of Relations.&quot;
Brian, let&#8217;s begin with you. Can you lay that relationship out? The significance of Saudi Arabia now bombing Yemen with the U.S. supporting Saudi Arabia?
BRIAN WHITAKER : Well, it&#8217;s a long and complicated relationship, really. You know, we have—Saudi Arabia is a rich, conservative monarchy, and on the other side, we have Yemen, which is very populous, it&#8217;s very poor, and it&#8217;s republican. And those two are separated by a border of about 1,500 miles, which is very difficult to police. I think, generally, among the Gulf monarchies, there&#8217;s a certain level of apprehension about Yemen, partly because it&#8217;s not like them.
And if we look at their relations with Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia was created as a state in 1932; within two years of that, there was a war between the Saudis and the Yemenis, which resulted in the—Yemen ceding some ethnically Yemeni territory to Saudi Arabia. And as part of that deal also, Yemenis were allowed to work in Saudi Arabia on quite generous terms, and that led to large numbers of Yemenis working in the kingdom and sending remittances back to Yemen. That was quite a rocky relationship, as well, because in the early 1990s, when the Saudis didn&#8217;t much like Yemen&#8217;s attitude to Saddam Hussein, several hundred thousand Yemeni workers were expelled from the kingdom.
We also had the North Yemeni Civil War in the 1960s, where we saw the Saudis intervening on behalf of the royalists, and the Egyptians intervening on behalf the republicans. So that was a military struggle. And then, in the mid-1990s when North and South Yemen became—have become unified, but then a war broke out between the North and the South. The Saudis were supporting the southern separatists.
And, of course, most recently, in 2009, when the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was having one of his six wars against the Houthis, the Saudis joined in then with a bombing campaign to help. So, there&#8217;s a long history, and also there&#8217;s a long history, apart from military things, of Saudi involvement in Yemeni politics, which has often taken the form of payments to tribes, politicians and so on—you know, the sort of things other people would probably call bribes.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, in effect, then, the Yemenis have functioned almost as a reserve labor force for Saudi Arabia? You were mentioning it. They also function that way for other states in the region? And also, you mentioned there were—the unification of Yemen. But for a time, there was actually—wasn&#8217;t there a left-wing government in South Yemen?
BRIAN WHITAKER : Indeed. The only Arab Marxist government was in the South, and that disappeared in 1990 when North and South became unified. Then, the southerners had second thoughts about it, and a war broke out in 2004, which lasted a few weeks. And so, basically, the Saudis were, at that stage, supporting the—as they were then, the ex-Marxists who had ruled the South. So it&#8217;s a curious relationship because, at some time or other, the Saudis have supported most of the different factions within Yemen.
AMY GOODMAN : Iona Craig, what do you feel is most important to understand right now? And can you talk about the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting that took place yesterday, a kind of Sunni meeting?
IONA CRAIG : Well, I think at the moment in Yemen, you have to realize that the situation has got to where it is now largely because of domestic politics, as well. People try and frame this as an Iran-versus-Saudi kind of battle, which it has now become, but it&#8217;s very much because of domestic politics. And the reason the Houthis have been able to get to where they are today is very much because of the support of Yemen&#8217;s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He has been plotting this for some time, certainly, you know, at least since 2012, 2013. And although they&#8217;re old enemies, they are now supporting each other in this battle. So, this came about, really, because Saleh was granted immunity by the GCC in the deal that he signed at the end of 2011. And these are the very same people that are now bombing him today, so there&#8217;s quite a deep irony in the situation that&#8217;s going on right now. And although Saleh hasn&#8217;t been doing that overtly, it was clear and very evident to me when I was on the ground in September, when the Houthis took Sana&#8217;a, that those men that were in plainclothes with Houthi stickers on their Kalashnikovs were in fact the Republican Guard. They were saying it openly, and people recognized them as former Republican Guard soldiers who were under the command of Ahmed Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh&#8217;s son. So I think you have to be—you know, it has to be quite clear that although you talk about the Houthis being supported by Iran, they&#8217;re actually, on the ground, being supported by Ali Abdullah Saleh much more than there is any evidence that they&#8217;re being supported by Iran at the moment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Iona Craig, as the civil strife in Yemen grows, do you have any sense of what&#8217;s going on with the jihadi forces within Yemen, and obviously, the United States&#8217; big concern, the drone strikes that have repeatedly been targeted within Yemen by the United States?
IONA CRAIG : Well, I think the issue now is the counterterrorism policy for the U.S. has pretty much vanished, in the sense that the National Security Bureau, that was really set up by the Americans, the Yemeni intelligence agency, in order to gather human intelligence to counter al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is now the hands of the Houthis. In addition to that, the counterterrorism troops that were being trained by the Americans, that all stopped last Friday when the Americans finally left. And now the Saudis, backed by America, are bombing military bases across the country. So, it&#8217;s certainly feasible that amongst all of that the counterterrorism troops are going to be impacted by that.
Now, as far as what the jihadist groups&#8217; reaction is to—for al-Qaeda, certainly, you know, for them, they&#8217;re going to be able to take advantage of this kind of mess that&#8217;s going on in Yemen, whether that means being able to take weapons as military bases are vacated, knowing that they&#8217;re going to be hit—if the Houthis haven&#8217;t already taken those weapons themselves. But it is going to be an opportunity for them, particularly as it&#8217;s going to polarize the society within Yemen itself. This sectarian element will become, you know, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and therefore that will, almost inevitably, in some way, drive some people into the hands of al-Qaeda. Even if they&#8217;re not before, they may find themselves fighting on the same side of al-Qaeda in order to defend themselves and their territory.
AMY GOODMAN : This issue of the U.S. role with Iran in all the different places now—working with Iran, if you will, in Iraq, although they kind of deny this; working against Iran in Yemen right now; and negotiating with Iran around a nuclear deal—Brian Whitaker, can you talk about the significance of this?
BRIAN WHITAKER : Well, obviously, there are quite a few ironies in that situation. The latest I&#8217;ve seen today, though, is that Iran doesn&#8217;t seem particularly interested in getting more deeply involved in Yemen at the moment. And that might be quite a smart move. I think the Americans would also be probably leaning on them not to step things up in Yemen, in order to secure the nuclear deal. I think that—for the Americans, I think the nuclear deal is probably the priority at the moment.
AMY GOODMAN : At this point, Iona Craig, what do you feel needs to happen? You know, we have President Obama famously recently saying that Yemen is the one major success story in the war against terrorism. What do you think, as you listen to a man I&#8217;m sure you know well, Farea Al-Muslimi, on the ground in Sana&#8217;a under the bombardment, saying, &quot;What our country needs is investment in the economy, is education, is not more bombs&quot;?
IONA CRAIG : I mean, certainly, most immediately, is some sort of political settlement to get out of this current crisis. But by pushing the Houthis this far, by deciding to bomb Yemen, I don&#8217;t think—the indication from the Houthis at the moment is they are not prepared to back down, which means more bombing and the possibility of even ground troops. The Houthis, you know, have been fighting in Yemen for over 10 years now. And I think the real risk is, if ground troops are involved, that this could be a very protracted and long, borne-out conflict, which is going to impact Yemenis massively.
You know, what Farea was saying was really depressing, but absolutely true. The economy has all but collapsed. The government—not that there is one, really, but there isn&#8217;t the finances to prop up the civil service indefinitely, and not even for many more weeks. You&#8217;ve got 16 million people in need of humanitarian aid, and that was before this conflict started. So, I think for Yemenis on the ground at the moment, there is this real risk for them that this becomes a long, drawn-out process, where the Saudis are saying it will be a few days of aerial bombardment in order to reduce the military power of the Houthis. But they know this territory. They&#8217;ve been fighting in Yemen, in the highlands in Yemen, for 10 years. If the Saudis or the Egyptians decide to take them on on the ground, this could be a very long process.
AMY GOODMAN : Iona Craig, we want to thank you for being with us, journalist based in Sana&#8217;a for four years as the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London, just recently awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Brian Whitaker, thanks so much for being with us, former Middle East editor for The Guardian , now runs the website Al-Bab.com . We&#8217;ll link to that. It covers Arab politics and society. Wrote the new report , &quot;Yemen and Saudi Arabia: A Historical Review of Relations.&quot; This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. AMYGOODMAN: To talk more about Yemen and the Saudi-led bombing campaign, we’re joined by two guests in London. Iona Craig is back with us, journalist who was based in Sana’a for four years as Yemen correspondent for The Times of London, awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014. And Brian Whitaker is with us, former Middle East editor for The Guardian. He now runs the website Al-Bab.com, which covers Arab politics and society, where he wrote a new report on "Yemen and Saudi Arabia: A Historical Review of Relations."

Brian, let’s begin with you. Can you lay that relationship out? The significance of Saudi Arabia now bombing Yemen with the U.S. supporting Saudi Arabia?

BRIANWHITAKER: Well, it’s a long and complicated relationship, really. You know, we have—Saudi Arabia is a rich, conservative monarchy, and on the other side, we have Yemen, which is very populous, it’s very poor, and it’s republican. And those two are separated by a border of about 1,500 miles, which is very difficult to police. I think, generally, among the Gulf monarchies, there’s a certain level of apprehension about Yemen, partly because it’s not like them.

And if we look at their relations with Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia was created as a state in 1932; within two years of that, there was a war between the Saudis and the Yemenis, which resulted in the—Yemen ceding some ethnically Yemeni territory to Saudi Arabia. And as part of that deal also, Yemenis were allowed to work in Saudi Arabia on quite generous terms, and that led to large numbers of Yemenis working in the kingdom and sending remittances back to Yemen. That was quite a rocky relationship, as well, because in the early 1990s, when the Saudis didn’t much like Yemen’s attitude to Saddam Hussein, several hundred thousand Yemeni workers were expelled from the kingdom.

We also had the North Yemeni Civil War in the 1960s, where we saw the Saudis intervening on behalf of the royalists, and the Egyptians intervening on behalf the republicans. So that was a military struggle. And then, in the mid-1990s when North and South Yemen became—have become unified, but then a war broke out between the North and the South. The Saudis were supporting the southern separatists.

And, of course, most recently, in 2009, when the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, was having one of his six wars against the Houthis, the Saudis joined in then with a bombing campaign to help. So, there’s a long history, and also there’s a long history, apart from military things, of Saudi involvement in Yemeni politics, which has often taken the form of payments to tribes, politicians and so on—you know, the sort of things other people would probably call bribes.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, in effect, then, the Yemenis have functioned almost as a reserve labor force for Saudi Arabia? You were mentioning it. They also function that way for other states in the region? And also, you mentioned there were—the unification of Yemen. But for a time, there was actually—wasn’t there a left-wing government in South Yemen?

BRIANWHITAKER: Indeed. The only Arab Marxist government was in the South, and that disappeared in 1990 when North and South became unified. Then, the southerners had second thoughts about it, and a war broke out in 2004, which lasted a few weeks. And so, basically, the Saudis were, at that stage, supporting the—as they were then, the ex-Marxists who had ruled the South. So it’s a curious relationship because, at some time or other, the Saudis have supported most of the different factions within Yemen.

AMYGOODMAN: Iona Craig, what do you feel is most important to understand right now? And can you talk about the Sharm el-Sheikh meeting that took place yesterday, a kind of Sunni meeting?

IONACRAIG: Well, I think at the moment in Yemen, you have to realize that the situation has got to where it is now largely because of domestic politics, as well. People try and frame this as an Iran-versus-Saudi kind of battle, which it has now become, but it’s very much because of domestic politics. And the reason the Houthis have been able to get to where they are today is very much because of the support of Yemen’s former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He has been plotting this for some time, certainly, you know, at least since 2012, 2013. And although they’re old enemies, they are now supporting each other in this battle. So, this came about, really, because Saleh was granted immunity by the GCC in the deal that he signed at the end of 2011. And these are the very same people that are now bombing him today, so there’s quite a deep irony in the situation that’s going on right now. And although Saleh hasn’t been doing that overtly, it was clear and very evident to me when I was on the ground in September, when the Houthis took Sana’a, that those men that were in plainclothes with Houthi stickers on their Kalashnikovs were in fact the Republican Guard. They were saying it openly, and people recognized them as former Republican Guard soldiers who were under the command of Ahmed Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh’s son. So I think you have to be—you know, it has to be quite clear that although you talk about the Houthis being supported by Iran, they’re actually, on the ground, being supported by Ali Abdullah Saleh much more than there is any evidence that they’re being supported by Iran at the moment.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Iona Craig, as the civil strife in Yemen grows, do you have any sense of what’s going on with the jihadi forces within Yemen, and obviously, the United States’ big concern, the drone strikes that have repeatedly been targeted within Yemen by the United States?

IONACRAIG: Well, I think the issue now is the counterterrorism policy for the U.S. has pretty much vanished, in the sense that the National Security Bureau, that was really set up by the Americans, the Yemeni intelligence agency, in order to gather human intelligence to counter al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is now the hands of the Houthis. In addition to that, the counterterrorism troops that were being trained by the Americans, that all stopped last Friday when the Americans finally left. And now the Saudis, backed by America, are bombing military bases across the country. So, it’s certainly feasible that amongst all of that the counterterrorism troops are going to be impacted by that.

Now, as far as what the jihadist groups’ reaction is to—for al-Qaeda, certainly, you know, for them, they’re going to be able to take advantage of this kind of mess that’s going on in Yemen, whether that means being able to take weapons as military bases are vacated, knowing that they’re going to be hit—if the Houthis haven’t already taken those weapons themselves. But it is going to be an opportunity for them, particularly as it’s going to polarize the society within Yemen itself. This sectarian element will become, you know, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and therefore that will, almost inevitably, in some way, drive some people into the hands of al-Qaeda. Even if they’re not before, they may find themselves fighting on the same side of al-Qaeda in order to defend themselves and their territory.

AMYGOODMAN: This issue of the U.S. role with Iran in all the different places now—working with Iran, if you will, in Iraq, although they kind of deny this; working against Iran in Yemen right now; and negotiating with Iran around a nuclear deal—Brian Whitaker, can you talk about the significance of this?

BRIANWHITAKER: Well, obviously, there are quite a few ironies in that situation. The latest I’ve seen today, though, is that Iran doesn’t seem particularly interested in getting more deeply involved in Yemen at the moment. And that might be quite a smart move. I think the Americans would also be probably leaning on them not to step things up in Yemen, in order to secure the nuclear deal. I think that—for the Americans, I think the nuclear deal is probably the priority at the moment.

AMYGOODMAN: At this point, Iona Craig, what do you feel needs to happen? You know, we have President Obama famously recently saying that Yemen is the one major success story in the war against terrorism. What do you think, as you listen to a man I’m sure you know well, Farea Al-Muslimi, on the ground in Sana’a under the bombardment, saying, "What our country needs is investment in the economy, is education, is not more bombs"?

IONACRAIG: I mean, certainly, most immediately, is some sort of political settlement to get out of this current crisis. But by pushing the Houthis this far, by deciding to bomb Yemen, I don’t think—the indication from the Houthis at the moment is they are not prepared to back down, which means more bombing and the possibility of even ground troops. The Houthis, you know, have been fighting in Yemen for over 10 years now. And I think the real risk is, if ground troops are involved, that this could be a very protracted and long, borne-out conflict, which is going to impact Yemenis massively.

You know, what Farea was saying was really depressing, but absolutely true. The economy has all but collapsed. The government—not that there is one, really, but there isn’t the finances to prop up the civil service indefinitely, and not even for many more weeks. You’ve got 16 million people in need of humanitarian aid, and that was before this conflict started. So, I think for Yemenis on the ground at the moment, there is this real risk for them that this becomes a long, drawn-out process, where the Saudis are saying it will be a few days of aerial bombardment in order to reduce the military power of the Houthis. But they know this territory. They’ve been fighting in Yemen, in the highlands in Yemen, for 10 years. If the Saudis or the Egyptians decide to take them on on the ground, this could be a very long process.

AMYGOODMAN: Iona Craig, we want to thank you for being with us, journalist based in Sana’a for four years as the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London, just recently awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. Brian Whitaker, thanks so much for being with us, former Middle East editor for The Guardian, now runs the website Al-Bab.com. We’ll link to that. It covers Arab politics and society. Wrote the new report, "Yemen and Saudi Arabia: A Historical Review of Relations." This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

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Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400Endless War: As U.S. Strikes Tikrit & Delays Afghan Pullout, "War on Terror" Toll Tops 1.3 Millionhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/26/endless_war_as_us_strikes_tikrit
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-26:en/story/7e8d47 AMY GOODMAN : U.S.-led coalition warplanes have begun bombing the Iraqi city of Tikrit in an attempt to seize control of the city from the self-described Islamic State. The assault on Tikrit began three weeks ago when Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed Shiite militia launched a ground offensive. The U.S. airstrikes now squarely put Washington and Tehran on the same side in the fight, though the Obama administration insists it&#8217;s not coordinating military operations with Iran. The Pentagon stressed that the airstrikes are aimed to help Iraqi forces defeat the Islamic State, but by all accounts it has been Iranian-backed militias leading the ground attack in Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran&#8217;s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had been on the ground advising the militias in Tikrit as recently as Sunday.
Meanwhile, in other Iraq news, a new report has found the Iraq War has killed about one million people. The Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other groups examined the toll from the so-called war on terror in three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The investigators found the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, a total of about 1.3 million.
We&#8217;re joined now by two guests who worked on the report. Hans von Sponeck is with us, former U.N. assistant secretary-general and U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sanctions regime. He&#8217;s the author of A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq . Von Sponeck is currently teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream. And Dr. Robert Gould is with us from San Francisco, the president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. He wrote the foreword for the new international edition of the report, called &quot;Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the &#39;War on Terror.&#39;&quot;
Dr. Robert Gould, the figures laid out in this report say 1.3 million people have died in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in [Pakistan]. And it says that this could possibly be not an overestimate; it says it&#8217;s the minimum numbers. It could possibly be as high as two million. Can you talk about the significance of what these figures mean?
DR. ROBERT GOULD : Well, these are, as you relate, incredible figures in terms of the total counts, and they compare markedly with those estimates that have come out of organizations such as Iraq Body Count in the past, which use very—what are known as passive methods of detecting casualties in war, because they rely on official reports and morgues and things like that to arrive at their estimates. But obviously those type of methods really lack the ability to determine the full cost of war, given that, particularly in the type of warfare we witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, many of these deaths are really silent, in the sense that people are killed by death squads, they&#8217;re killed by bombing raids, that are really off the records, and we don&#8217;t get to really understand the full impact of the war. That&#8217;s why a number of the people who are incorporated within the new issue of &quot;Body Count,&quot; in terms of looking at the totality of the reports, there&#8217;s a very important examination of what we—of more active methods of sampling. And these are methods that have been used in diverse places such as Sudan, the Congo, for their various horrible war situations, as well. So, what this report really does is bring to us, in its North American release, a really fuller accounting of what the human costs of that war have been, which, you know, just listening to the headlines on the news this morning that you&#8217;ve related, we could still see the impacts of the destabilization that we, our government and allies, have created in Iraq and elsewhere.
AMY GOODMAN : And why the people particularly in the United States do not see anything like these numbers? The significance of what it would mean?
DR. ROBERT GOULD : Well, I think there has been, in a similar way to what our collective experience has been with the reporting in the Vietnam War, a real distancing of the impacts on the people over there. We have certainly accounted for the dead and wounded within—in terms of the numbers of U.S. troops and NATO forces in the various conflicts, but these deaths, this destruction, is, for variety of reasons, very deliberately or through self-censorship, kept from the American people so we don&#8217;t see these real costs. And I would also say we don&#8217;t see the connecting points about how these policies and that degree of death and destruction leads through the destabilization of these regions and the persistent killing that&#8217;s conducted by drone warfare, etc. We&#8217;re insulated from these effects and don&#8217;t understand the anger that arises from people who have been through, now 12 years in Iraq, the act of war, even longer in Afghanistan, what those effects are. And I would think that as a result, people are insulated from what—the milieu within which groups like ISIS arise. And at a time when we&#8217;re contemplating at this point cutting off our removal of troops from Afghanistan and contemplating new military authorization for increasing our operations in Syria and Iraq, this insulation from the real impacts serves our government in being able to continue to conduct these wars in the name of the war on terror, with not only horrendous cost to the people in the region, but we in the United States suffer from what the budgetary costs of unending war are.
AMY GOODMAN : Again, this report , &quot;Body Count,&quot; that 1.3 million figure includes Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani dead; it does not include areas like Yemen.
DR. ROBERT GOULD : Correct.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re also joined by Hans von Sponeck, former U.N. assistant secretary-general and former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sections regime. Dr. von Sponeck, I thank you for joining us. Can you respond, as a person who&#8217;s been deeply involved in Iraq—as we speak today, the U.S. is leading the bombing of Tikrit, what, 12 years after the U.S. first invaded Iraq—to this report that you have written an introduction for, called &quot;Body Count&quot;?
HANS VON SPONECK : Well, first of all, good morning, Amy. Good to hear you. I&#8217;m sorry we can&#8217;t see each other.
But let me just say that it is, in my experience, not surprising that, ultimately, we see courage coming out of the United States in terms of facing the truth, the facts. Dianne Feinstein has done that in December with the release of the CIA torture report. The Physicians for Social Responsibility, together with IPPNW in other parts of the world, have now released the &quot;Body Count&quot; report, which is, both documents, I think, an incredibly powerful and valuable basis for which to discuss—at long last discuss—the possibility of redress and learning—learning, for example, that all these interactions, whether it was in Iraq or in Afghanistan or in Syria or in Libya, the regime change approach to solving problems of international relations have no future, should not have a future. It&#8217;s so clear now. The &quot;Body Count&quot; report makes it very clear that not only that young men and women in uniform, but also innocent civilians, once again, become victim.
What I very much hope is that the &quot;Body Count&quot; publication will not—will not lead to a futile debate on the accuracy of data. It reminds me of the 2000 release by UNICEF of the child mortality study on Iraq, where the debate that should have taken place about the causes of all that was detoured by a debate on whether Lancet or &quot;Body Count&quot; or any other documentation had the correct figures. I think that&#8217;s totally, in my view, irrelevant. We have enough credible data from different sources, and the &quot;Body Count&quot; publication is an attempt to show the most recent efforts to at least get credible indicators, not the hardcore, empirical facts—not possible. And I think that is the importance of all of this, that we use that as a basis for a long-overdue debate in Washington, in London, and certainly at the United Nations in New York, as to why this all happened and how one can try and prevent this from recurring in the future.
AMY GOODMAN : Your response to the U.S. bombing Tikrit now?
HANS VON SPONECK : Well, it sounds maybe too simple to just say, &quot;Look, what we are seeing now is what we—what the seeds have grown.&quot; Many people will probably disagree strongly in the United States when I say that ISIS is a relative of a Western intervention. ISIS , as it developed, developed after the 19th of March, 2003. Not to acknowledge that, I think, is pursuing an ostrich policy. It was the way an occupation force behaves that created the first seeds of an ISIS . The Sunni belt in central Iraq, that suddenly was faced with an understanding that they had no future, that it was a Shia future, the disbanding of—we know all these things—of the army, of the bureaucracy, all against the Hague Convention, that doesn&#8217;t allow for structural changes by an occupation army—all that led to a reaction. And a lot of reasons why ISIS is today in Tikrit has to do with the fact that very normal Sunnis and other Iraqi citizens felt that they were betrayed, and they started to rise, and they started to support the extreme elements that we now see face to face with militias of Shia origin, with Iranian forces and the Iraqi military, of course, also. So, ISIS in Tikrit goes back to March 2003. That&#8217;s the point I&#8217;m trying to make.
AMY GOODMAN : On Tuesday, I participated in a conference at Hofstra University on Long Island, which was assessing the George W. Bush presidency. I want to turn to a clip of my exchange with John Negroponte, a man that you know well. He was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the former director of national intelligence.
AMY GOODMAN : Just a quick question. Mr. Goss said, &quot;If we knew then what we know today, we might have done things differently,&quot; which I think is a very reasonable thing to say.
PORTER GOSS : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you think that, Mr. Negroponte, that knowing what we know today, the Iraq War was wrong? And do you think torture is wrong?
JOHN NEGROPONTE : Look, well, torture is never right. And—
AMY GOODMAN : Do think the Bush administration was wrong to engage in it?
JOHN NEGROPONTE : I say torture is never right. That&#8217;s my first point.
But my second point was, I&#8217;ll just stick with the way I felt during the time I lived through those events. And you can find quotes of what I said when I was ambassador to the U.N. I was asked if I thought we should use force in Iraq. And I said, well, in questions like this, I think we ought to approach the issue with a great deal of caution. I also said that we ought to—and I felt that we ought to—allow the inspection process more time to do its work. I was disappointed that it wasn&#8217;t allowed. But, you know, you have one president at a time. He&#8217;s the commander-in-chief. He&#8217;s got the constitutional authority, and that&#8217;s what he decided to do.
The last point I would make, to your issue about Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, Blix and I had a chance to reminisce about this a little bit later on. And I said to him, &quot;It&#8217;s amazing, you know? We set up this inspection thing, and we never found anything. And, you know, what the heck happened?&quot; And Blix said, &quot;You know, it&#8217;s—that&#8217;s right.&quot; But he said, &quot;I can&#8217;t—I still don&#8217;t understand why Saddam behaved so guilty.&quot; And maybe that&#8217;s why he had some doubt, because he was—Saddam sort of emitted, emanated, this sort of sensation that he had—that he was hiding something. Now, some people have speculated—and I think it was an FBI agent who had interviewed him extensively—that, actually, he wanted some people to think that he had WMD in his neighborhood in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, and so that maybe this was part of his strategy. But it kind of—if indeed it was his strategy, it boomeranged.
AMY GOODMAN : Hans von Sponeck, if you could respond to what the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the former head of national intelligence, John Negroponte, said at this session? You are the former U.N. assistant secretary-general and former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq.
HANS VON SPONECK : Well, you know, Ambassador Negroponte was a well-known figure in my days in Baghdad, and I know where he&#8217;s coming from. What he has to say about the perception or the question why Saddam Hussein didn&#8217;t disclose that he had no weapons of mass destruction, I think that speculation surprises me. I think any political analyst should have really understood very quickly, if he or she knew the constellation in the Middle East, the war of eight years between Iraq and Iran. Saddam Hussein, as a self-appointed leader of the region, didn&#8217;t want to show that he was weak, that he had an army that would have no chance against any neighbor because of the poor equipment and whatever. So he didn&#8217;t want. It was a question of cultural response and shame, shame. He was ashamed to admit that he was really nobody&#8217;s—nobody&#8217;s foe. Nobody could take him seriously. So that is one reason why I think Saddam Hussein acted the way he did.
This business, the statement, torture is never right—every single page of the 200 pages that I have read as of today of the CIA torture report released by the U.S. Senate, every page is an admission of confusion, a lack of cooperation among the CIA , the FBI , the Department of State, other—the legal authorities. And that made it possible, that horrific violation of U.S. national as well as international law—Geneva Convention, Hague Convention—all these documents that say the right things were violated by the most unbelievable cruelty of these—yeah, these adopted extended interrogation techniques, performed, and the suffering that resulted from that.
And there is only one thing, Amy, that I feel is missing. It took a lot of courage for the release of that report. That has to be acknowledged. And I hope that people, countries around the world do so. But there&#8217;s a word missing. In these 500 pages that are released, there should somewhere a reference to accountability. Impunity cannot possibly be an answer in dealing with what we are reading in that document. So, I&#8217;d hope that Mr. Negroponte would go a little bit beyond just saying torture is never right. Well, that was known at the time when he was the head of the intelligence community, and what was done about it?
AMY GOODMAN : And Ambassador Negroponte saying he felt that the U.S. moved into war too quickly in Iraq, that he wanted the inspections to continue, did that ring true for you from your experience of him in Iraq, though he came a bit later, after the war began?
HANS VON SPONECK : If I understood you correctly here, I think it is very clear, from what my colleague Hans Blix pleaded for—and that is, &quot;Give me three more months, and I will then conclusively be able to tell you that Iraq is quantitatively disarmed&quot;—qualitatively, Iraq was, anyway—that was known in the intelligence community—no longer a threat to anybody. But he wanted to go that last step, that would have shown that disarmament, as arms inspectors have said ever since 1995, had really progressed to the point where one could declare Iraq, from the perspective of weapons of mass destruction, as disarmed. But that opportunity wasn&#8217;t given to him.
AMY GOODMAN : Hans von Sponeck, I know you to leave for a funeral, but I wanted to ask you one last question. You, together with another former U.N. assistant secretary-general, Denis Halliday, have been working on this issue of accountability. Can you explain what you&#8217;ve been doing?
HANS VON SPONECK : Well, if I have a moment, then let me just say that Denis Halliday and I, first of all, we are in weekly contact with each other to compare notes and synchronize our approaches. We both are three—or, two out of three commissioners of a war crimes tribunal that was established by the former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir, in 2005. We have been trying hard to prepare very seriously collected evidence of torture performed at different levels in Iraq during the years of occupation. We interviewed—the famous picture of the man in the hood that went around the world, we interviewed this man in the hood in Kuala Lumpur. We talked to many of the torture victims from Abu Ghraib, from Bagram, from Guantánamo. So, this overwhelming body of evidence was published in two volumes that were sent in 2012 to the International Criminal Court. And the sobering response from there was, &quot;Sorry, we are not responsible for a case like that.&quot; Well, parties have changed. There is a new chief prosecutor in The Hague. And we are now—in mid-April, on the 18th of April, in fact, the War Crimes Commission will meet yet again in Kuala Lumpur to prepare for the second, and hopefully last, draft submission of this documentation to the International Criminal Court.
I should also like to add that last June I personally handed, in the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the U.K., these volumes of evidence, in the hope that this would generate the discussion about these issues in the British political circles. That hasn&#8217;t happened. But we are not going to give up. We are not blind or hateful even—that would be terrible—extremists in our demands, but we insist that impunity cannot be the answer. And we are very much, Amy, encouraged by these moments of light, like the publication of the CIA torture report, by the fact that the professional medical community in the United States, the Physicians for Social Responsibility, had the courage to go along in publishing this document now. So, more and more parties are coming together, and I hope that it will lead to that which, if nothing else, we owe to also the Iraqi people, to gain their dignity back, to recognize—for them to recognize that the world doesn&#8217;t accept what has happened, and the courts, hopefully, in the United States and in the U.K. will start the proceedings.
AMY GOODMAN : Hans von Sponeck, I want to thank you very much for being with us, former U.N. assistant secretary-general, former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sanctions regime, author of A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq . And I want to thank Dr. Robert Gould, president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. He wrote the foreword for the new international edition of the group&#8217;s report , &quot;Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the &#39;War on Terror.&#39;&quot; Hans von Sponeck was joining us from near Freiburg, Germany, where he lives. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . We&#8217;ll be back in a minute. AMYGOODMAN: U.S.-led coalition warplanes have begun bombing the Iraqi city of Tikrit in an attempt to seize control of the city from the self-described Islamic State. The assault on Tikrit began three weeks ago when Iraqi forces and Iranian-backed Shiite militia launched a ground offensive. The U.S. airstrikes now squarely put Washington and Tehran on the same side in the fight, though the Obama administration insists it’s not coordinating military operations with Iran. The Pentagon stressed that the airstrikes are aimed to help Iraqi forces defeat the Islamic State, but by all accounts it has been Iranian-backed militias leading the ground attack in Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had been on the ground advising the militias in Tikrit as recently as Sunday.

Meanwhile, in other Iraq news, a new report has found the Iraq War has killed about one million people. The Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other groups examined the toll from the so-called war on terror in three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The investigators found the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around one million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, a total of about 1.3 million.

We’re joined now by two guests who worked on the report. Hans von Sponeck is with us, former U.N. assistant secretary-general and U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sanctions regime. He’s the author of A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq. Von Sponeck is currently teaching at the University of Marburg in Germany, joining us by Democracy Now! video stream. And Dr. Robert Gould is with us from San Francisco, the president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. He wrote the foreword for the new international edition of the report, called "Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror.'"

Dr. Robert Gould, the figures laid out in this report say 1.3 million people have died in Iraq, in Afghanistan and in [Pakistan]. And it says that this could possibly be not an overestimate; it says it’s the minimum numbers. It could possibly be as high as two million. Can you talk about the significance of what these figures mean?

DR. ROBERTGOULD: Well, these are, as you relate, incredible figures in terms of the total counts, and they compare markedly with those estimates that have come out of organizations such as Iraq Body Count in the past, which use very—what are known as passive methods of detecting casualties in war, because they rely on official reports and morgues and things like that to arrive at their estimates. But obviously those type of methods really lack the ability to determine the full cost of war, given that, particularly in the type of warfare we witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere, many of these deaths are really silent, in the sense that people are killed by death squads, they’re killed by bombing raids, that are really off the records, and we don’t get to really understand the full impact of the war. That’s why a number of the people who are incorporated within the new issue of "Body Count," in terms of looking at the totality of the reports, there’s a very important examination of what we—of more active methods of sampling. And these are methods that have been used in diverse places such as Sudan, the Congo, for their various horrible war situations, as well. So, what this report really does is bring to us, in its North American release, a really fuller accounting of what the human costs of that war have been, which, you know, just listening to the headlines on the news this morning that you’ve related, we could still see the impacts of the destabilization that we, our government and allies, have created in Iraq and elsewhere.

AMYGOODMAN: And why the people particularly in the United States do not see anything like these numbers? The significance of what it would mean?

DR. ROBERTGOULD: Well, I think there has been, in a similar way to what our collective experience has been with the reporting in the Vietnam War, a real distancing of the impacts on the people over there. We have certainly accounted for the dead and wounded within—in terms of the numbers of U.S. troops and NATO forces in the various conflicts, but these deaths, this destruction, is, for variety of reasons, very deliberately or through self-censorship, kept from the American people so we don’t see these real costs. And I would also say we don’t see the connecting points about how these policies and that degree of death and destruction leads through the destabilization of these regions and the persistent killing that’s conducted by drone warfare, etc. We’re insulated from these effects and don’t understand the anger that arises from people who have been through, now 12 years in Iraq, the act of war, even longer in Afghanistan, what those effects are. And I would think that as a result, people are insulated from what—the milieu within which groups like ISIS arise. And at a time when we’re contemplating at this point cutting off our removal of troops from Afghanistan and contemplating new military authorization for increasing our operations in Syria and Iraq, this insulation from the real impacts serves our government in being able to continue to conduct these wars in the name of the war on terror, with not only horrendous cost to the people in the region, but we in the United States suffer from what the budgetary costs of unending war are.

AMYGOODMAN: Again, this report, "Body Count," that 1.3 million figure includes Iraqi, Afghan and Pakistani dead; it does not include areas like Yemen.

DR. ROBERTGOULD: Correct.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re also joined by Hans von Sponeck, former U.N. assistant secretary-general and former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sections regime. Dr. von Sponeck, I thank you for joining us. Can you respond, as a person who’s been deeply involved in Iraq—as we speak today, the U.S. is leading the bombing of Tikrit, what, 12 years after the U.S. first invaded Iraq—to this report that you have written an introduction for, called "Body Count"?

HANSVONSPONECK: Well, first of all, good morning, Amy. Good to hear you. I’m sorry we can’t see each other.

But let me just say that it is, in my experience, not surprising that, ultimately, we see courage coming out of the United States in terms of facing the truth, the facts. Dianne Feinstein has done that in December with the release of the CIA torture report. The Physicians for Social Responsibility, together with IPPNW in other parts of the world, have now released the "Body Count" report, which is, both documents, I think, an incredibly powerful and valuable basis for which to discuss—at long last discuss—the possibility of redress and learning—learning, for example, that all these interactions, whether it was in Iraq or in Afghanistan or in Syria or in Libya, the regime change approach to solving problems of international relations have no future, should not have a future. It’s so clear now. The "Body Count" report makes it very clear that not only that young men and women in uniform, but also innocent civilians, once again, become victim.

What I very much hope is that the "Body Count" publication will not—will not lead to a futile debate on the accuracy of data. It reminds me of the 2000 release by UNICEF of the child mortality study on Iraq, where the debate that should have taken place about the causes of all that was detoured by a debate on whether Lancet or "Body Count" or any other documentation had the correct figures. I think that’s totally, in my view, irrelevant. We have enough credible data from different sources, and the "Body Count" publication is an attempt to show the most recent efforts to at least get credible indicators, not the hardcore, empirical facts—not possible. And I think that is the importance of all of this, that we use that as a basis for a long-overdue debate in Washington, in London, and certainly at the United Nations in New York, as to why this all happened and how one can try and prevent this from recurring in the future.

AMYGOODMAN: Your response to the U.S. bombing Tikrit now?

HANSVONSPONECK: Well, it sounds maybe too simple to just say, "Look, what we are seeing now is what we—what the seeds have grown." Many people will probably disagree strongly in the United States when I say that ISIS is a relative of a Western intervention. ISIS, as it developed, developed after the 19th of March, 2003. Not to acknowledge that, I think, is pursuing an ostrich policy. It was the way an occupation force behaves that created the first seeds of an ISIS. The Sunni belt in central Iraq, that suddenly was faced with an understanding that they had no future, that it was a Shia future, the disbanding of—we know all these things—of the army, of the bureaucracy, all against the Hague Convention, that doesn’t allow for structural changes by an occupation army—all that led to a reaction. And a lot of reasons why ISIS is today in Tikrit has to do with the fact that very normal Sunnis and other Iraqi citizens felt that they were betrayed, and they started to rise, and they started to support the extreme elements that we now see face to face with militias of Shia origin, with Iranian forces and the Iraqi military, of course, also. So, ISIS in Tikrit goes back to March 2003. That’s the point I’m trying to make.

AMYGOODMAN: On Tuesday, I participated in a conference at Hofstra University on Long Island, which was assessing the George W. Bush presidency. I want to turn to a clip of my exchange with John Negroponte, a man that you know well. He was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the former director of national intelligence.

AMYGOODMAN: Just a quick question. Mr. Goss said, "If we knew then what we know today, we might have done things differently," which I think is a very reasonable thing to say.

PORTERGOSS: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you think that, Mr. Negroponte, that knowing what we know today, the Iraq War was wrong? And do you think torture is wrong?

JOHNNEGROPONTE: Look, well, torture is never right. And—

AMYGOODMAN: Do think the Bush administration was wrong to engage in it?

JOHNNEGROPONTE: I say torture is never right. That’s my first point.

But my second point was, I’ll just stick with the way I felt during the time I lived through those events. And you can find quotes of what I said when I was ambassador to the U.N. I was asked if I thought we should use force in Iraq. And I said, well, in questions like this, I think we ought to approach the issue with a great deal of caution. I also said that we ought to—and I felt that we ought to—allow the inspection process more time to do its work. I was disappointed that it wasn’t allowed. But, you know, you have one president at a time. He’s the commander-in-chief. He’s got the constitutional authority, and that’s what he decided to do.

The last point I would make, to your issue about Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, Blix and I had a chance to reminisce about this a little bit later on. And I said to him, "It’s amazing, you know? We set up this inspection thing, and we never found anything. And, you know, what the heck happened?" And Blix said, "You know, it’s—that’s right." But he said, "I can’t—I still don’t understand why Saddam behaved so guilty." And maybe that’s why he had some doubt, because he was—Saddam sort of emitted, emanated, this sort of sensation that he had—that he was hiding something. Now, some people have speculated—and I think it was an FBI agent who had interviewed him extensively—that, actually, he wanted some people to think that he had WMD in his neighborhood in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, and so that maybe this was part of his strategy. But it kind of—if indeed it was his strategy, it boomeranged.

AMYGOODMAN: Hans von Sponeck, if you could respond to what the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the former head of national intelligence, John Negroponte, said at this session? You are the former U.N. assistant secretary-general and former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq.

HANSVONSPONECK: Well, you know, Ambassador Negroponte was a well-known figure in my days in Baghdad, and I know where he’s coming from. What he has to say about the perception or the question why Saddam Hussein didn’t disclose that he had no weapons of mass destruction, I think that speculation surprises me. I think any political analyst should have really understood very quickly, if he or she knew the constellation in the Middle East, the war of eight years between Iraq and Iran. Saddam Hussein, as a self-appointed leader of the region, didn’t want to show that he was weak, that he had an army that would have no chance against any neighbor because of the poor equipment and whatever. So he didn’t want. It was a question of cultural response and shame, shame. He was ashamed to admit that he was really nobody’s—nobody’s foe. Nobody could take him seriously. So that is one reason why I think Saddam Hussein acted the way he did.

This business, the statement, torture is never right—every single page of the 200 pages that I have read as of today of the CIA torture report released by the U.S. Senate, every page is an admission of confusion, a lack of cooperation among the CIA, the FBI, the Department of State, other—the legal authorities. And that made it possible, that horrific violation of U.S. national as well as international law—Geneva Convention, Hague Convention—all these documents that say the right things were violated by the most unbelievable cruelty of these—yeah, these adopted extended interrogation techniques, performed, and the suffering that resulted from that.

And there is only one thing, Amy, that I feel is missing. It took a lot of courage for the release of that report. That has to be acknowledged. And I hope that people, countries around the world do so. But there’s a word missing. In these 500 pages that are released, there should somewhere a reference to accountability. Impunity cannot possibly be an answer in dealing with what we are reading in that document. So, I’d hope that Mr. Negroponte would go a little bit beyond just saying torture is never right. Well, that was known at the time when he was the head of the intelligence community, and what was done about it?

AMYGOODMAN: And Ambassador Negroponte saying he felt that the U.S. moved into war too quickly in Iraq, that he wanted the inspections to continue, did that ring true for you from your experience of him in Iraq, though he came a bit later, after the war began?

HANSVONSPONECK: If I understood you correctly here, I think it is very clear, from what my colleague Hans Blix pleaded for—and that is, "Give me three more months, and I will then conclusively be able to tell you that Iraq is quantitatively disarmed"—qualitatively, Iraq was, anyway—that was known in the intelligence community—no longer a threat to anybody. But he wanted to go that last step, that would have shown that disarmament, as arms inspectors have said ever since 1995, had really progressed to the point where one could declare Iraq, from the perspective of weapons of mass destruction, as disarmed. But that opportunity wasn’t given to him.

AMYGOODMAN: Hans von Sponeck, I know you to leave for a funeral, but I wanted to ask you one last question. You, together with another former U.N. assistant secretary-general, Denis Halliday, have been working on this issue of accountability. Can you explain what you’ve been doing?

HANSVONSPONECK: Well, if I have a moment, then let me just say that Denis Halliday and I, first of all, we are in weekly contact with each other to compare notes and synchronize our approaches. We both are three—or, two out of three commissioners of a war crimes tribunal that was established by the former prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir, in 2005. We have been trying hard to prepare very seriously collected evidence of torture performed at different levels in Iraq during the years of occupation. We interviewed—the famous picture of the man in the hood that went around the world, we interviewed this man in the hood in Kuala Lumpur. We talked to many of the torture victims from Abu Ghraib, from Bagram, from Guantánamo. So, this overwhelming body of evidence was published in two volumes that were sent in 2012 to the International Criminal Court. And the sobering response from there was, "Sorry, we are not responsible for a case like that." Well, parties have changed. There is a new chief prosecutor in The Hague. And we are now—in mid-April, on the 18th of April, in fact, the War Crimes Commission will meet yet again in Kuala Lumpur to prepare for the second, and hopefully last, draft submission of this documentation to the International Criminal Court.

I should also like to add that last June I personally handed, in the House of Commons and the House of Lords in the U.K., these volumes of evidence, in the hope that this would generate the discussion about these issues in the British political circles. That hasn’t happened. But we are not going to give up. We are not blind or hateful even—that would be terrible—extremists in our demands, but we insist that impunity cannot be the answer. And we are very much, Amy, encouraged by these moments of light, like the publication of the CIA torture report, by the fact that the professional medical community in the United States, the Physicians for Social Responsibility, had the courage to go along in publishing this document now. So, more and more parties are coming together, and I hope that it will lead to that which, if nothing else, we owe to also the Iraqi people, to gain their dignity back, to recognize—for them to recognize that the world doesn’t accept what has happened, and the courts, hopefully, in the United States and in the U.K. will start the proceedings.

AMYGOODMAN: Hans von Sponeck, I want to thank you very much for being with us, former U.N. assistant secretary-general, former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, who in 2000 resigned his post in protest of the U.S.-led sanctions regime, author of A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq. And I want to thank Dr. Robert Gould, president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. He wrote the foreword for the new international edition of the group’s report, "Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror.'" Hans von Sponeck was joining us from near Freiburg, Germany, where he lives. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. We’ll be back in a minute.

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Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400"Inside Baghdad's Brutal Battle Against ISIS": In Chaos of Post-Invasion Iraq, Militias Take Holdhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/24/inside_baghdads_brutal_battle_against_isis
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-24:en/story/a23c02 AARON MATÉ: Matt Aikins with Rolling Stone , your piece is called &quot;Inside Baghdad&#8217;s Brutal Battle Against ISIS .&quot; You were there speaking to Iraqi officials and militia leaders. Can you tell us about what you found? And talk about the broader Iraqi policy of deploying militias and how it&#8217;s arose, particularly with the collapse of the Iraqi army when ISIS overran large parts of the country last year.
MATTHIEU AIKINS : Sure. Well, what, you know, happened was essentially a reaction to the rapid gains that ISIS made this summer. When the defense of Mosul and other areas collapsed, these militias were called upon as a kind of last line of defense in order to protect the sort of Shia areas of the southern part of the country, including Iraq. And they were effective at doing that. But in doing so, as we&#8217;ve already discussed, they took over this preeminent position within the Iraqi state.
So, when I was there, I met with militia commanders, including one from a very notorious militia called Asa&#8217;ib Ahl al-Haq. It&#8217;s a splinter group from the Mahdi Army that once fought the Americans and is now fighting ISIS . And the commander explained to me something that I&#8217;ve heard from other places, as well, that on the ground, these militia commanders are often leading the operations, and they&#8217;re essentially mixed in with Iraqi army and police units, borrowing weapons, being supplied by ammunition from them, using heavy weapons, and often exercising command and control over Iraqi police and army. And what that says is that the two of—you know, the formal state security services, what&#8217;s left with them, and these militias have become entangled to such a degree that it&#8217;s hard in many cases to make a meaningful distinction between them on the ground.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re speaking to Matt Aikins in Karachi, Pakistan, right now. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a crow behind you or something, Matt. But you begin your piece by saying, &quot;If you visited the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad during the holy month of Muharram this past fall, you would be forgiven for thinking that Iraq, like its neighbor Iran, is a country whose official religion is Shiite Islam.&quot; Explain.
MATTHIEU AIKINS : Well, the thing is that you would be just confronted with these religious symbols that make, you know, no pretense that Iraq is a state that is supposed to have equal regard for the different sects and religions that compose it. Baghdad is now a Shia city. And so, I think one of the things we&#8217;ve seen after the events this summer is that mask has really come off. As Erin pointed out, a lot of these things were happening before. And a lot of them were predicted. What happened in Amerli and in Diyala was essentially predicted by Human Rights Watch and other groups that were investigating it, that there would be what amounts to ethnic cleansing, in my view. But the mask has sort of slipped off now, and there&#8217;s really no pretense or attempt at pretense that this is not a sectarian war that&#8217;s being fought by the preeminent actors on both sides, ISIS and the militias.
AARON MATÉ: So, Matt, given this dynamic, what do you think this portends for Iraq&#8217;s future? Could we see a return to the brutal days of 2006, 2007, when the sectarian conflict was out of control and tens of thousands of killed? Is there a fear of sliding back into that?
MATTHIEU AIKINS : I mean, I think we already are—we already are there, in many ways. You know, last year, there was an estimated 17,000 Iraqis that were killed. That&#8217;s the most violent year by far since the peak of the violence, 2006, 2007. In some cases, it&#8217;s one-sided, in areas of Baghdad that I visited. These were Sunni areas that had been taken over by al-Qaeda in 2006 and &#39;07, often because the communities wanted some sort of defense against the Shia militias. Now they&#39;re being terrorized by Shia groups. There&#8217;s absolute, you know, outright warfare in the countryside, massacres on both sides. So I think we&#8217;re actually there. With the shift toward offensive operations of the parties&#8217; militias, especially with large areas like Mosul and Fallujah, I mean, they&#8217;re going to make what&#8217;s been happening in Amerli and Diyala look minor in comparison to the scale of massacres and human rights abuses that are likely to occur.
AMY GOODMAN : Matt, here in the United States, where you just were, you have the Republicans attacking President Obama for negotiating with Iran around a nuclear bomb, and you have, of course, the call to defeat the so-called Islamic State, ISIS . But here you have, on the ground, it&#8217;s Iran that is fighting ISIS . How much coordination is going on between the United States and Iran now in trying to defeat ISIS ?
MATTHIEU AIKINS : Well, they&#8217;re often sharing the same space. One Iraqi adviser told me it was like hide and seek. You know, the Iranians would show up when the Americans weren&#8217;t there, and the Americans would show up when the Iranians weren&#8217;t there. This is in the sort of ministries and main bases. The Iranians are the only ones present in the field, really, so far.
I think you have to acknowledge that Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq. I mean, this is their doorstep. ISIS is a brutal anti-Shia group that poses a grave threat to their own interests. And the fact that we have this longstanding proxy war with Iran has really prevented any sort of constructive engagement on solving the problems that are going on in Iraq, and instead you have a kind of willful denial about the actual common strategy that is currently taking place.
AARON MATÉ: And, Erin Evers, looking forward also, how do you think these abuses will impact the long-term fight against ISIS and also Iraq&#8217;s basic unity?
ERIN EVERS : I think, you know, what we&#8217;re seeing right now already, actually, is that these kinds of abuses are really radicalizing and ostracizing the Sunni population even more than they already were. So, people that we talked to on the ground who were displaced by the fighting, who were displaced by militias who threatened them with death if they tried to come back to their homes, are essentially now—you&#8217;ve got thousands of people displaced as a result of these militia operations who are literally geographically stuck between ISIS on one side, whose ideology they don&#8217;t accept and who they don&#8217;t want to be a part of, but who do not have a sectarian mandate to kill them and who haven&#8217;t specifically threatened to kill them like the sectarian militias have. And so, our concern is that for every tactical gain that the Shia militias are making against ISIS , in the long run they&#8217;re actually empowering ISIS and emboldening ISIS and throwing people straight into their hands.
So, the way that I see things going, from my experience on the ground, from what we documented in Amerli and Diyala and other areas all around Iraq, is that if things keep going this way and that if militias keep leading the fight, essentially, you&#8217;re going to have a state that is a militia state with a large, you know, kind of swath of territory that militias control, Sunnis kind of hiding in the western corner, and ISIS a problem that is never really fully dealt with, because—you know, because a sectarian—there&#8217;s no sectarian solution to the ISIS problem. You can&#8217;t get rid of all of the Sunnis in Iraq. They are part of Iraq. And, you know, most kind of average Iraqis don&#8217;t want to see the country split up. So, I think that it&#8217;s—I think that it poses a huge problem, both politically and in terms of security for Iraq&#8217;s future.
AMY GOODMAN : Erin, you have said that the U.S. military didn&#8217;t give some weapons to some groups—at least they said that to you. Matt, you write in your piece, &quot;the Obama administration has also argued that its program to supply weapons to the Iraqi government should be eligible for an exemption from arms-control laws.&quot;
MATTHIEU AIKINS : That&#8217;s right. I mean, obviously they&#8217;re worried about the weapons they&#8217;re now transferring to Iraq, in a sort of rushed emergency program, being put into the wrong hands, so they&#8217;d like to exempt themselves from those legal obligations. I think it&#8217;s ironic that, you know, having flooded the country once with weapons by destroying and disbanding Saddam Hussein&#8217;s army and then flooding it again with weapons by arming this hastily prepared army and police in response to the insurgency, which is weapons that have now fallen in the hands of ISIS . This, the third solution, is to, again, flood more weapons into the country.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally—
MATTHIEU AIKINS : And I think it just shows the lack of imagination that exists on the part of the policymakers who are responsible for dealing with these problems.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Matt, President Obama is meeting with the new Afghan president, Ghani, today in Washington. You&#8217;ve lived in Afghanistan for years. The significance for this meeting—the significance of this meeting, and what President Ghani will be calling for?
MATTHIEU AIKINS : President Ghani is going to be calling for more troops and more money. He understands that the Afghan state is utterly dependent on international funding. The budget gap is extraordinary. It&#8217;s something like 20 percent of the country&#8217;s GDP right now that&#8217;s being spent by the international community on the armed forces alone. So, basically, Afghanistan is going to remain a client state of the United States and the international community for a long time to come, especially if the conflict isn&#8217;t brought to some sort of negotiated solution. And Ghani is basically trying to undo the damage that President Karzai did to that relationship, that really threatened a total cutoff of, if not aid, but troops.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, we want to thank you both for being with us. Matthieu Aikins, joining us from Karachi, Pakistan, the George Polk Award-winning foreign correspondent, his latest piece for Rolling Stone we&#8217;ll link to. It&#8217;s headlined &quot;Inside Baghdad&#8217;s Brutal Battle Against ISIS .&quot; And thanks so much to Erin Evers, a Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. She co-wrote the new report , &quot;After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Militias and the Aftermath of Amerli.&quot; She&#8217;s been on the ground in Iraq with Human Rights Watch since September of 2012. And we&#8217;ll link to that report, as well.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at the issue of Iran, Israel and Palestine. Stay with us. AARON MATÉ: Matt Aikins with Rolling Stone, your piece is called "Inside Baghdad’s Brutal Battle Against ISIS." You were there speaking to Iraqi officials and militia leaders. Can you tell us about what you found? And talk about the broader Iraqi policy of deploying militias and how it’s arose, particularly with the collapse of the Iraqi army when ISIS overran large parts of the country last year.

MATTHIEUAIKINS: Sure. Well, what, you know, happened was essentially a reaction to the rapid gains that ISIS made this summer. When the defense of Mosul and other areas collapsed, these militias were called upon as a kind of last line of defense in order to protect the sort of Shia areas of the southern part of the country, including Iraq. And they were effective at doing that. But in doing so, as we’ve already discussed, they took over this preeminent position within the Iraqi state.

So, when I was there, I met with militia commanders, including one from a very notorious militia called Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. It’s a splinter group from the Mahdi Army that once fought the Americans and is now fighting ISIS. And the commander explained to me something that I’ve heard from other places, as well, that on the ground, these militia commanders are often leading the operations, and they’re essentially mixed in with Iraqi army and police units, borrowing weapons, being supplied by ammunition from them, using heavy weapons, and often exercising command and control over Iraqi police and army. And what that says is that the two of—you know, the formal state security services, what’s left with them, and these militias have become entangled to such a degree that it’s hard in many cases to make a meaningful distinction between them on the ground.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re speaking to Matt Aikins in Karachi, Pakistan, right now. I don’t know if that’s a crow behind you or something, Matt. But you begin your piece by saying, "If you visited the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad during the holy month of Muharram this past fall, you would be forgiven for thinking that Iraq, like its neighbor Iran, is a country whose official religion is Shiite Islam." Explain.

MATTHIEUAIKINS: Well, the thing is that you would be just confronted with these religious symbols that make, you know, no pretense that Iraq is a state that is supposed to have equal regard for the different sects and religions that compose it. Baghdad is now a Shia city. And so, I think one of the things we’ve seen after the events this summer is that mask has really come off. As Erin pointed out, a lot of these things were happening before. And a lot of them were predicted. What happened in Amerli and in Diyala was essentially predicted by Human Rights Watch and other groups that were investigating it, that there would be what amounts to ethnic cleansing, in my view. But the mask has sort of slipped off now, and there’s really no pretense or attempt at pretense that this is not a sectarian war that’s being fought by the preeminent actors on both sides, ISIS and the militias.

AARON MATÉ: So, Matt, given this dynamic, what do you think this portends for Iraq’s future? Could we see a return to the brutal days of 2006, 2007, when the sectarian conflict was out of control and tens of thousands of killed? Is there a fear of sliding back into that?

MATTHIEUAIKINS: I mean, I think we already are—we already are there, in many ways. You know, last year, there was an estimated 17,000 Iraqis that were killed. That’s the most violent year by far since the peak of the violence, 2006, 2007. In some cases, it’s one-sided, in areas of Baghdad that I visited. These were Sunni areas that had been taken over by al-Qaeda in 2006 and '07, often because the communities wanted some sort of defense against the Shia militias. Now they're being terrorized by Shia groups. There’s absolute, you know, outright warfare in the countryside, massacres on both sides. So I think we’re actually there. With the shift toward offensive operations of the parties’ militias, especially with large areas like Mosul and Fallujah, I mean, they’re going to make what’s been happening in Amerli and Diyala look minor in comparison to the scale of massacres and human rights abuses that are likely to occur.

AMYGOODMAN: Matt, here in the United States, where you just were, you have the Republicans attacking President Obama for negotiating with Iran around a nuclear bomb, and you have, of course, the call to defeat the so-called Islamic State, ISIS. But here you have, on the ground, it’s Iran that is fighting ISIS. How much coordination is going on between the United States and Iran now in trying to defeat ISIS?

MATTHIEUAIKINS: Well, they’re often sharing the same space. One Iraqi adviser told me it was like hide and seek. You know, the Iranians would show up when the Americans weren’t there, and the Americans would show up when the Iranians weren’t there. This is in the sort of ministries and main bases. The Iranians are the only ones present in the field, really, so far.

I think you have to acknowledge that Iran has legitimate interests in Iraq. I mean, this is their doorstep. ISIS is a brutal anti-Shia group that poses a grave threat to their own interests. And the fact that we have this longstanding proxy war with Iran has really prevented any sort of constructive engagement on solving the problems that are going on in Iraq, and instead you have a kind of willful denial about the actual common strategy that is currently taking place.

AARON MATÉ: And, Erin Evers, looking forward also, how do you think these abuses will impact the long-term fight against ISIS and also Iraq’s basic unity?

ERINEVERS: I think, you know, what we’re seeing right now already, actually, is that these kinds of abuses are really radicalizing and ostracizing the Sunni population even more than they already were. So, people that we talked to on the ground who were displaced by the fighting, who were displaced by militias who threatened them with death if they tried to come back to their homes, are essentially now—you’ve got thousands of people displaced as a result of these militia operations who are literally geographically stuck between ISIS on one side, whose ideology they don’t accept and who they don’t want to be a part of, but who do not have a sectarian mandate to kill them and who haven’t specifically threatened to kill them like the sectarian militias have. And so, our concern is that for every tactical gain that the Shia militias are making against ISIS, in the long run they’re actually empowering ISIS and emboldening ISIS and throwing people straight into their hands.

So, the way that I see things going, from my experience on the ground, from what we documented in Amerli and Diyala and other areas all around Iraq, is that if things keep going this way and that if militias keep leading the fight, essentially, you’re going to have a state that is a militia state with a large, you know, kind of swath of territory that militias control, Sunnis kind of hiding in the western corner, and ISIS a problem that is never really fully dealt with, because—you know, because a sectarian—there’s no sectarian solution to the ISIS problem. You can’t get rid of all of the Sunnis in Iraq. They are part of Iraq. And, you know, most kind of average Iraqis don’t want to see the country split up. So, I think that it’s—I think that it poses a huge problem, both politically and in terms of security for Iraq’s future.

AMYGOODMAN: Erin, you have said that the U.S. military didn’t give some weapons to some groups—at least they said that to you. Matt, you write in your piece, "the Obama administration has also argued that its program to supply weapons to the Iraqi government should be eligible for an exemption from arms-control laws."

MATTHIEUAIKINS: That’s right. I mean, obviously they’re worried about the weapons they’re now transferring to Iraq, in a sort of rushed emergency program, being put into the wrong hands, so they’d like to exempt themselves from those legal obligations. I think it’s ironic that, you know, having flooded the country once with weapons by destroying and disbanding Saddam Hussein’s army and then flooding it again with weapons by arming this hastily prepared army and police in response to the insurgency, which is weapons that have now fallen in the hands of ISIS. This, the third solution, is to, again, flood more weapons into the country.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally—

MATTHIEUAIKINS: And I think it just shows the lack of imagination that exists on the part of the policymakers who are responsible for dealing with these problems.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Matt, President Obama is meeting with the new Afghan president, Ghani, today in Washington. You’ve lived in Afghanistan for years. The significance for this meeting—the significance of this meeting, and what President Ghani will be calling for?

MATTHIEUAIKINS: President Ghani is going to be calling for more troops and more money. He understands that the Afghan state is utterly dependent on international funding. The budget gap is extraordinary. It’s something like 20 percent of the country’s GDP right now that’s being spent by the international community on the armed forces alone. So, basically, Afghanistan is going to remain a client state of the United States and the international community for a long time to come, especially if the conflict isn’t brought to some sort of negotiated solution. And Ghani is basically trying to undo the damage that President Karzai did to that relationship, that really threatened a total cutoff of, if not aid, but troops.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you both for being with us. Matthieu Aikins, joining us from Karachi, Pakistan, the George Polk Award-winning foreign correspondent, his latest piece for Rolling Stone we’ll link to. It’s headlined "Inside Baghdad’s Brutal Battle Against ISIS." And thanks so much to Erin Evers, a Iraq researcher for Human Rights Watch. She co-wrote the new report, "After Liberation Came Destruction: Iraqi Militias and the Aftermath of Amerli." She’s been on the ground in Iraq with Human Rights Watch since September of 2012. And we’ll link to that report, as well.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we look at the issue of Iran, Israel and Palestine. Stay with us.

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Tue, 24 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400Yemen in Crisis: U.S. Closes Key Drone Base & Withdraws Forces as U.N. Warns of Civil Warhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/23/yemen_in_crisis_us_closes_key
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-23:en/story/3fb20f AMY GOODMAN : We begin in Yemen, where the government is on the edge of civil war amidst intense clashes with Shia Houthi rebels and an attack on two mosques that left more than 130 people dead. Over the weekend, rebels took over the country&#8217;s third largest city, Taiz, and its military airport. Now the United States has evacuated its remaining military personnel, citing the country&#8217;s deteriorating security situation. Meanwhile, the U.S. has recalled approximately 100 special operations forces from a southern military base seen as key in its drone campaign against al-Qaeda militants. The Obama administration had previously praised the Yemeni government as being a model for successful counterterrorism partnerships. But it closed its embassy in the capital city of Sana&#8217;a earlier this year after Houthi rebels overtook the city and deposed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. In recent days, unidentified warplanes have reportedly bombed Hadi&#8217;s Aden headquarters. He recently wrote a letter to the United Nations requesting, quote, &quot;urgent intervention.&quot; On Sunday, the U.N. Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss Yemen&#8217;s political crisis. The U.N. special adviser to the country, Jamal Benomar, warned the situation could become a, quote, &quot;Iraq-Libya-Syria&quot; scenario.
JAMAL BENOMAR : It would be an illusion to think that the Houthis could mount an offensive and succeed in taking control of the entire country, including Marib, Taiz and the south. It would be equally false to think that President Hadi could assemble sufficient forces to liberate the country from the Houthis. Any side that would want to push the country in either direction would be inviting a protracted conflict in the vein of an Iraq-Libya-Syria combined scenario.
AMY GOODMAN : Meanwhile, during Friday prayers, suicide bombers attacked two mosques in Sana&#8217;a, killing more than 130 worshipers and wounding hundreds. The so-called Islamic State took credit for the coordinated attacks. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke denounced both the mosque attacks and the ongoing attacks on U.S.-backed President Hadi.
JEFF RATHKE : We express our condolences to the families of the victims, and we deplore the brutality of the terrorists who perpetrated today&#8217;s unprovoked attack on Yemeni citizens who were peacefully engaging in Friday prayers in their places of worship. We also strongly condemn the March 19 airstrike targeting the presidential palace in Aden. We call upon all actors within Yemen to halt all unilateral and offensive military actions. We specifically call on the Houthis, former President Saleh and their allies to stop their violent incitement and undermining of President Hadi, who is Yemen&#8217;s legitimate president. The way forward for Yemen must be through a political solution.
AMY GOODMAN : For more, we go to London, where we&#8217;re joined by Iona Craig. She&#8217;s a journalist who was based in Sana&#8217;a, Yemen, for four years as the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London, was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014.
Iona, welcome back to Democracy Now! Please just describe what&#8217;s happening in Yemen today.
IONA CRAIG : Well, at the moment, you&#8217;ve got a complex fracturing of various different political groups. So, in the north now, you have the Houthis in control in Sana&#8217;a, and Hadi, the president, is down in the south, in Aden. In the midst of all that, you&#8217;ve got tribal groups who are aligning themselves one way or the other. You&#8217;ve got the secessionists, the Southern Movement in the south who are calling for independence. Some of those, the militia groups, have aligned themselves to Hadi. But really, a lot of them are looking for this opportunity to fight the north, because they really see the Houthis as Ali Abdullah Saleh in disguise and have long-held grievances against him. So, you&#8217;ve got multiple factions who are ready to fight—some of them are already fighting—for different motivations.
AMY GOODMAN : How it has come to this point, at this point?
IONA CRAIG : Well, really, this has been a car crash in slow motion, to watch it. This has come after the Arab Spring in 2011. When Ali Abdullah Saleh signed over power, he was granted immunity from that point, and he was allowed to stay in Yemen. And so, he was allowed to still continue in politics, really, and keep manipulating as he always had done, but from then on from the side. And really, this was—then seemed to be a plan of action then to use the Houthis as a way of almost getting revenge against Islah, Yemen&#8217;s equivalent to the Muslim Brotherhood, and creating this scenario that we are now in, in Yemen. And Hadi has been forced into a corner as a result of all of this. So it&#8217;s really as a result of events after the Arab Spring and the transition deal that was then signed, that didn&#8217;t address the grievances of the Houthis or the Southern Movement and others. And despite the international community pushing on with the transition, it was almost inevitable that this was going to come to a head at some point.
AMY GOODMAN : On Saturday, the Yemeni president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, accused the Houthi militia of staging a coup against him. He said he would &quot;raise Yemen&#8217;s flag&quot; in the Houthis&#8217; northern stronghold. Hadi called on all political groups to attend peace talks in Saudi Arabia.
PRESIDENT ABDU RABBU MANSOUR HADI : [translated] I call on all political parties to feel the seriousness of the current phase and ignore inadequate partisan views. I call on them to actively participate in the talks to be held in the Secretariat General of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh, to come up with resolutions in order to avoid Yemen&#8217;s plunging into secession and violence, and to have determination to correct the track of the political process.
AMY GOODMAN : The U.S. has supported the president, Hadi, but who in Yemen supports him, Iona Craig?
IONA CRAIG : Well, at the moment, in Hadi&#8217;s position in Aden, he&#8217;s been encouraging and employing, really, local militias there, the popular committees that existed in the south anyway, and had done since 2011, who were set up to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Ansar al-Sharia, and now are aligned to Hadi. More recently, after the bombing of his compound in Aden just a couple of days ago, there have been units of the air force that have also aligned themselves with Hadi. So, there were fighter jets that were flown from the eastern province of Hadhramaut down to Aden, because, obviously, without air power, he&#8217;s also going to be struggling to defend himself. So who is stronger militarily? It really looks like the Houthis and the supporters and sympathizers of Ali Abdullah Saleh are. They have the heavier weapons. They did have the complete, you know, control of the air force, although that&#8217;s now divided. The military still remains divided. But if it came down to an all-out fight, it&#8217;s not clear who would win that fight, but it probably looks like the Houthis and Ali Abdullah Saleh.
AMY GOODMAN : On Friday, a journalist asked State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke if the U.S. is worried about Yemen collapsing. This is what Rathke responded.
JEFF RATHKE : Well, a civil war would be a terrible development for Yemen, but that&#8217;s why we believe it&#8217;s essential for all the parties and groups to avoid unilateral actions, to avoid violence, as I mentioned at the top. And that&#8217;s why we, along with international partners, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the United Nations, are supporting a Yemeni political transition process. Political instability is a threat to the well-being of all Yemenis.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s State Department spokesperson Jeff Rathke. Your response, Iona?
IONA CRAIG : Well, I mean, of course, the main concern of America, really, is the counterterrorism issue. And certainly, you know, the only way out of this domestically in Yemen is negotiations, but it&#8217;s looking increasingly like there&#8217;s going to be more conflict and more war. And really, the international community has very little, now, influence in the outcome of that. The Americans, along with the other Western embassies, all left earlier this year, left their embassies in Sana&#8217;a. Now, you know, Jamal Benomar is really the front for the international community in trying to arrange these talks. And then, of course, you&#8217;ve got the regional powers who also have an interest. But, you know, the American focus has always been in Yemen primarily one of counterterrorism, and that sort of model for Washington now has all but been erased.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s talk about—let&#8217;s talk about those regional interests. You&#8217;ve got Saudi Arabia and also Iran. What role are they playing?
IONA CRAIG : Well, always, you know, the Houthis&#8217; opponents have said that they are supported by Iran, and certainly, you know, the rhetoric over recent months from Tehran has suggested and made it pretty clear that they do support the Houthis. And once the Houthis took Sana&#8217;a, there were daily flights started between Tehran and Sana&#8217;a.
And meanwhile, there&#8217;s, you know, Saudi Arabia&#8217;s interest; obviously, they have a concern over the rise of the Houthis. They&#8217;ve fought the Houthis before. But at the same time, they run something of a risk by supporting Hadi if he is not going to survive. So the Saudis have been very much involved in backing and supporting some of the tribal groups who are looking to oppose the Houthis&#8217; expansion and are preparing to fight the Houthis if they move into their areas, particularly in Marib and in Shabwah. So, the Saudis are obviously concerned, because a complete collapse in Yemen not only raises the issue of terrorism issues, but it also means that they&#8217;ve got the risk of Yemenis running over the border looking for money, employment, and also, when you get—with the worsening humanitarian situation, which there is in Yemen right now, if it does fall into an all-out war and a civil war, then there are going to be many people looking to flee Yemen over the border into Saudi Arabia.
AMY GOODMAN : Last week, a prominent Yemeni journalist was assassinated in the capital Sana&#8217;a. Abdul Kareem al-Khaiwani was reportedly shot dead near his home by gunmen riding a motorbike. This is a clip of him speaking in 2010 at the Oslo Freedom Forum, talking about the Yemeni government&#8217;s crackdown on journalists.
ABDUL KAREEM AL- KHAIWANI : [translated] The independent press is considered treasonous for its alleged ties to foreign powers, whenever it deviates from the official personality cult around President Saleh. I have been a journalist since 1990. I am not the most brilliant journalist in Yemen, but an example of what journalists are subjected to—oppression, kidnapping, imprisonment, beatings, newspaper bans, or even closures, and Internet website censorship. We didn&#8217;t give up on our belief in democratic values, as we believed initially the government&#8217;s promises of pluralism. However, as journalists, we warned against dangers, envisioned Yemen&#8217;s future. We were drunk. Drunk as we were with dreams of liberty, we exposed corruption, rights abused, and called things as they were. We discussed publicly how the country is ruled, and pointed to the root causes of terrorism. We shared with Yemenis the whispers from under the rulers&#8217; table. The government response came in even tougher repression of journalists, imprisonments, kidnappings and newspaper closures.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Yemeni journalist Abdul Kareem al-Khaiwani. He was assassinated last week near his home in Sana&#8217;a. Iona Craig, you worked in Yemen, and particularly in Sana&#8217;a, for years. Did you know him?
IONA CRAIG : Yes, I knew Abdul Kareem. I think, you know, everybody knew him. He was something of a legend amongst the journalist community in Sana&#8217;a. He was a Houthi activist. He was—but he was also a very outspoken critic of Ali Abdullah Saleh. He had been a journalist for 25 years. And he—during the wars in Sana&#8217;a—sorry, in Sa&#8217;dah in the north against the Houthis from 2004, he had really tried to cover that conflict and show the atrocities that had been carried out by the government when they had been bombing their own population in Sa&#8217;dah, when it was a very difficult place to access. Journalists couldn&#8217;t get there. Even the U.N. agencies couldn&#8217;t get access to the area. And he ended up in jail as a result of criticizing Ali Abdullah Saleh. So, although he was a Houthi supporter and activist, he was much more than that, and a very outspoken voice for a long, long time against the old regime and against Ali Abdullah Saleh.
AMY GOODMAN : Any thoughts on who killed him?
IONA CRAIG : Well, he was one of the last moderate voices of the Houthi movement, really. I mean, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for his assassination, but, really, it&#8217;s got to be viewed as a politically motivated assassination. As I said before, he was a very outspoken critic of Saleh, and he certainly didn&#8217;t pose a threat to al-Qaeda in any way. You know, he wasn&#8217;t a fighter, he was a journalist. So, for him to be assassinated in this way and for al-Qaeda to claim it, it certainly doesn&#8217;t seem to have appeared in—happened in isolation, that there was certainly some kind of political motivation behind that killing, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : Iona Craig, the U.S. says they&#8217;ve pulled out their last remaining military, 100 special operations forces that ran a drone base in Yemen. Can you talk about the significance of that base?
IONA CRAIG : Well, Al Anad is in southern Yemen, and it&#8217;s between sort of Taiz and Aden, where Hadi is positioned now. And, of course, the Houthis are now taking control of Taiz. So it&#8217;s a strategically important air base, as well. And it&#8217;s a very important place for Hadi to have control of, if he was going to be able to protect himself in Aden. And so, when they withdrew, it was not just a consequence of apparent attack by al-Qaeda in a town, in Houta, just down the road, but it was also about the domestic political struggle and who was in command of that base, which had been led by a commander loyal to Ali Abdullah Saleh, and when, you know, Hadi had an interest in making sure that he had control of that base. So it became part of the domestic political struggle. And the American troops there were really stuck in the middle, and so they had little option but to withdraw by that stage.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, the U.N. had a rare U.N. Security Council meeting on Sunday to talk about the situation in Yemen. What came out of that? And where do you think Yemen will be going from here right now? And what do you think can be done?
IONA CRAIG : Well, I think, you know, a lot of what was said at the U.N. Security Council meeting is nothing new, and it&#8217;s not really going to change the situation on the ground. And the Houthis aren&#8217;t really adhering to or listening to anything the Security Council have got to say. You know, it&#8217;s all about calling for dialogue, which is kind of essential but is really struggling to progress at the moment. There was Qatar calling for the use of force under Chapter VII , which the Gulf community has been doing anyway, but nothing has come of that.
And, you know, really, most immediately now in Yemen, it&#8217;s certainly looking inevitable that there&#8217;s going to be more conflict, the way the Houthis are progressing, the way that Hadi is trying to build up militias on his side, and every day we&#8217;re seeing more and more conflict in rural areas, as well as in Taiz at the moment, but at—in regional points, both in Marib and al-Bayda, in Lahij, and that seems to be becoming more regular and more widespread. So, really, the prospects of a peaceful resolution are looking remote at the moment.
But obviously Jamal Benomar is trying to do his best to initiate those talks and get a resolution at the end of it. But even with the agreements that have been made before—there was an agreement made in September when the Houthis took over Sana&#8217;a, and that&#8217;s, you know, all but collapsed, really. It&#8217;s vanished. And the Houthis just didn&#8217;t adhere to that agreement. And certainly, from Hadi&#8217;s point of view and from Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthis, the speeches they&#8217;ve been making over the last couple of days have both been mentioning dialogue, but really have been posturing for war and really kind of looking like conflict is going to be inevitable on both sides.
AMY GOODMAN : Iona Craig, I want to thank you for being with us, a journalist who was based in Sana&#8217;a for four years as the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London. She was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014.
When we come back, we remember Danny Schechter, &quot;The News Dissector.&quot; We&#8217;ll be speaking with the acclaimed South African journalist, filmmaker, Anant Singh, who made the film The Long Walk to Freedom , and Danny Schechter&#8217;s longtime colleague and friend, Rory O&#8217;Connor. This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back in a minute. AMYGOODMAN: We begin in Yemen, where the government is on the edge of civil war amidst intense clashes with Shia Houthi rebels and an attack on two mosques that left more than 130 people dead. Over the weekend, rebels took over the country’s third largest city, Taiz, and its military airport. Now the United States has evacuated its remaining military personnel, citing the country’s deteriorating security situation. Meanwhile, the U.S. has recalled approximately 100 special operations forces from a southern military base seen as key in its drone campaign against al-Qaeda militants. The Obama administration had previously praised the Yemeni government as being a model for successful counterterrorism partnerships. But it closed its embassy in the capital city of Sana’a earlier this year after Houthi rebels overtook the city and deposed President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi. In recent days, unidentified warplanes have reportedly bombed Hadi’s Aden headquarters. He recently wrote a letter to the United Nations requesting, quote, "urgent intervention." On Sunday, the U.N. Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss Yemen’s political crisis. The U.N. special adviser to the country, Jamal Benomar, warned the situation could become a, quote, "Iraq-Libya-Syria" scenario.

JAMALBENOMAR: It would be an illusion to think that the Houthis could mount an offensive and succeed in taking control of the entire country, including Marib, Taiz and the south. It would be equally false to think that President Hadi could assemble sufficient forces to liberate the country from the Houthis. Any side that would want to push the country in either direction would be inviting a protracted conflict in the vein of an Iraq-Libya-Syria combined scenario.

AMYGOODMAN: Meanwhile, during Friday prayers, suicide bombers attacked two mosques in Sana’a, killing more than 130 worshipers and wounding hundreds. The so-called Islamic State took credit for the coordinated attacks. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke denounced both the mosque attacks and the ongoing attacks on U.S.-backed President Hadi.

JEFFRATHKE: We express our condolences to the families of the victims, and we deplore the brutality of the terrorists who perpetrated today’s unprovoked attack on Yemeni citizens who were peacefully engaging in Friday prayers in their places of worship. We also strongly condemn the March 19 airstrike targeting the presidential palace in Aden. We call upon all actors within Yemen to halt all unilateral and offensive military actions. We specifically call on the Houthis, former President Saleh and their allies to stop their violent incitement and undermining of President Hadi, who is Yemen’s legitimate president. The way forward for Yemen must be through a political solution.

AMYGOODMAN: For more, we go to London, where we’re joined by Iona Craig. She’s a journalist who was based in Sana’a, Yemen, for four years as the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London, was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014.

IONACRAIG: Well, at the moment, you’ve got a complex fracturing of various different political groups. So, in the north now, you have the Houthis in control in Sana’a, and Hadi, the president, is down in the south, in Aden. In the midst of all that, you’ve got tribal groups who are aligning themselves one way or the other. You’ve got the secessionists, the Southern Movement in the south who are calling for independence. Some of those, the militia groups, have aligned themselves to Hadi. But really, a lot of them are looking for this opportunity to fight the north, because they really see the Houthis as Ali Abdullah Saleh in disguise and have long-held grievances against him. So, you’ve got multiple factions who are ready to fight—some of them are already fighting—for different motivations.

AMYGOODMAN: How it has come to this point, at this point?

IONACRAIG: Well, really, this has been a car crash in slow motion, to watch it. This has come after the Arab Spring in 2011. When Ali Abdullah Saleh signed over power, he was granted immunity from that point, and he was allowed to stay in Yemen. And so, he was allowed to still continue in politics, really, and keep manipulating as he always had done, but from then on from the side. And really, this was—then seemed to be a plan of action then to use the Houthis as a way of almost getting revenge against Islah, Yemen’s equivalent to the Muslim Brotherhood, and creating this scenario that we are now in, in Yemen. And Hadi has been forced into a corner as a result of all of this. So it’s really as a result of events after the Arab Spring and the transition deal that was then signed, that didn’t address the grievances of the Houthis or the Southern Movement and others. And despite the international community pushing on with the transition, it was almost inevitable that this was going to come to a head at some point.

AMYGOODMAN: On Saturday, the Yemeni president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, accused the Houthi militia of staging a coup against him. He said he would "raise Yemen’s flag" in the Houthis’ northern stronghold. Hadi called on all political groups to attend peace talks in Saudi Arabia.

PRESIDENTABDURABBUMANSOURHADI: [translated] I call on all political parties to feel the seriousness of the current phase and ignore inadequate partisan views. I call on them to actively participate in the talks to be held in the Secretariat General of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh, to come up with resolutions in order to avoid Yemen’s plunging into secession and violence, and to have determination to correct the track of the political process.

AMYGOODMAN: The U.S. has supported the president, Hadi, but who in Yemen supports him, Iona Craig?

IONACRAIG: Well, at the moment, in Hadi’s position in Aden, he’s been encouraging and employing, really, local militias there, the popular committees that existed in the south anyway, and had done since 2011, who were set up to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Ansar al-Sharia, and now are aligned to Hadi. More recently, after the bombing of his compound in Aden just a couple of days ago, there have been units of the air force that have also aligned themselves with Hadi. So, there were fighter jets that were flown from the eastern province of Hadhramaut down to Aden, because, obviously, without air power, he’s also going to be struggling to defend himself. So who is stronger militarily? It really looks like the Houthis and the supporters and sympathizers of Ali Abdullah Saleh are. They have the heavier weapons. They did have the complete, you know, control of the air force, although that’s now divided. The military still remains divided. But if it came down to an all-out fight, it’s not clear who would win that fight, but it probably looks like the Houthis and Ali Abdullah Saleh.

AMYGOODMAN: On Friday, a journalist asked State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke if the U.S. is worried about Yemen collapsing. This is what Rathke responded.

JEFFRATHKE: Well, a civil war would be a terrible development for Yemen, but that’s why we believe it’s essential for all the parties and groups to avoid unilateral actions, to avoid violence, as I mentioned at the top. And that’s why we, along with international partners, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the United Nations, are supporting a Yemeni political transition process. Political instability is a threat to the well-being of all Yemenis.

IONACRAIG: Well, I mean, of course, the main concern of America, really, is the counterterrorism issue. And certainly, you know, the only way out of this domestically in Yemen is negotiations, but it’s looking increasingly like there’s going to be more conflict and more war. And really, the international community has very little, now, influence in the outcome of that. The Americans, along with the other Western embassies, all left earlier this year, left their embassies in Sana’a. Now, you know, Jamal Benomar is really the front for the international community in trying to arrange these talks. And then, of course, you’ve got the regional powers who also have an interest. But, you know, the American focus has always been in Yemen primarily one of counterterrorism, and that sort of model for Washington now has all but been erased.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s talk about—let’s talk about those regional interests. You’ve got Saudi Arabia and also Iran. What role are they playing?

IONACRAIG: Well, always, you know, the Houthis’ opponents have said that they are supported by Iran, and certainly, you know, the rhetoric over recent months from Tehran has suggested and made it pretty clear that they do support the Houthis. And once the Houthis took Sana’a, there were daily flights started between Tehran and Sana’a.

And meanwhile, there’s, you know, Saudi Arabia’s interest; obviously, they have a concern over the rise of the Houthis. They’ve fought the Houthis before. But at the same time, they run something of a risk by supporting Hadi if he is not going to survive. So the Saudis have been very much involved in backing and supporting some of the tribal groups who are looking to oppose the Houthis’ expansion and are preparing to fight the Houthis if they move into their areas, particularly in Marib and in Shabwah. So, the Saudis are obviously concerned, because a complete collapse in Yemen not only raises the issue of terrorism issues, but it also means that they’ve got the risk of Yemenis running over the border looking for money, employment, and also, when you get—with the worsening humanitarian situation, which there is in Yemen right now, if it does fall into an all-out war and a civil war, then there are going to be many people looking to flee Yemen over the border into Saudi Arabia.

AMYGOODMAN: Last week, a prominent Yemeni journalist was assassinated in the capital Sana’a. Abdul Kareem al-Khaiwani was reportedly shot dead near his home by gunmen riding a motorbike. This is a clip of him speaking in 2010 at the Oslo Freedom Forum, talking about the Yemeni government’s crackdown on journalists.

ABDULKAREEM AL-KHAIWANI: [translated] The independent press is considered treasonous for its alleged ties to foreign powers, whenever it deviates from the official personality cult around President Saleh. I have been a journalist since 1990. I am not the most brilliant journalist in Yemen, but an example of what journalists are subjected to—oppression, kidnapping, imprisonment, beatings, newspaper bans, or even closures, and Internet website censorship. We didn’t give up on our belief in democratic values, as we believed initially the government’s promises of pluralism. However, as journalists, we warned against dangers, envisioned Yemen’s future. We were drunk. Drunk as we were with dreams of liberty, we exposed corruption, rights abused, and called things as they were. We discussed publicly how the country is ruled, and pointed to the root causes of terrorism. We shared with Yemenis the whispers from under the rulers’ table. The government response came in even tougher repression of journalists, imprisonments, kidnappings and newspaper closures.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Yemeni journalist Abdul Kareem al-Khaiwani. He was assassinated last week near his home in Sana’a. Iona Craig, you worked in Yemen, and particularly in Sana’a, for years. Did you know him?

IONACRAIG: Yes, I knew Abdul Kareem. I think, you know, everybody knew him. He was something of a legend amongst the journalist community in Sana’a. He was a Houthi activist. He was—but he was also a very outspoken critic of Ali Abdullah Saleh. He had been a journalist for 25 years. And he—during the wars in Sana’a—sorry, in Sa’dah in the north against the Houthis from 2004, he had really tried to cover that conflict and show the atrocities that had been carried out by the government when they had been bombing their own population in Sa’dah, when it was a very difficult place to access. Journalists couldn’t get there. Even the U.N. agencies couldn’t get access to the area. And he ended up in jail as a result of criticizing Ali Abdullah Saleh. So, although he was a Houthi supporter and activist, he was much more than that, and a very outspoken voice for a long, long time against the old regime and against Ali Abdullah Saleh.

AMYGOODMAN: Any thoughts on who killed him?

IONACRAIG: Well, he was one of the last moderate voices of the Houthi movement, really. I mean, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for his assassination, but, really, it’s got to be viewed as a politically motivated assassination. As I said before, he was a very outspoken critic of Saleh, and he certainly didn’t pose a threat to al-Qaeda in any way. You know, he wasn’t a fighter, he was a journalist. So, for him to be assassinated in this way and for al-Qaeda to claim it, it certainly doesn’t seem to have appeared in—happened in isolation, that there was certainly some kind of political motivation behind that killing, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: Iona Craig, the U.S. says they’ve pulled out their last remaining military, 100 special operations forces that ran a drone base in Yemen. Can you talk about the significance of that base?

IONACRAIG: Well, Al Anad is in southern Yemen, and it’s between sort of Taiz and Aden, where Hadi is positioned now. And, of course, the Houthis are now taking control of Taiz. So it’s a strategically important air base, as well. And it’s a very important place for Hadi to have control of, if he was going to be able to protect himself in Aden. And so, when they withdrew, it was not just a consequence of apparent attack by al-Qaeda in a town, in Houta, just down the road, but it was also about the domestic political struggle and who was in command of that base, which had been led by a commander loyal to Ali Abdullah Saleh, and when, you know, Hadi had an interest in making sure that he had control of that base. So it became part of the domestic political struggle. And the American troops there were really stuck in the middle, and so they had little option but to withdraw by that stage.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, the U.N. had a rare U.N. Security Council meeting on Sunday to talk about the situation in Yemen. What came out of that? And where do you think Yemen will be going from here right now? And what do you think can be done?

IONACRAIG: Well, I think, you know, a lot of what was said at the U.N. Security Council meeting is nothing new, and it’s not really going to change the situation on the ground. And the Houthis aren’t really adhering to or listening to anything the Security Council have got to say. You know, it’s all about calling for dialogue, which is kind of essential but is really struggling to progress at the moment. There was Qatar calling for the use of force under Chapter VII, which the Gulf community has been doing anyway, but nothing has come of that.

And, you know, really, most immediately now in Yemen, it’s certainly looking inevitable that there’s going to be more conflict, the way the Houthis are progressing, the way that Hadi is trying to build up militias on his side, and every day we’re seeing more and more conflict in rural areas, as well as in Taiz at the moment, but at—in regional points, both in Marib and al-Bayda, in Lahij, and that seems to be becoming more regular and more widespread. So, really, the prospects of a peaceful resolution are looking remote at the moment.

But obviously Jamal Benomar is trying to do his best to initiate those talks and get a resolution at the end of it. But even with the agreements that have been made before—there was an agreement made in September when the Houthis took over Sana’a, and that’s, you know, all but collapsed, really. It’s vanished. And the Houthis just didn’t adhere to that agreement. And certainly, from Hadi’s point of view and from Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Houthis, the speeches they’ve been making over the last couple of days have both been mentioning dialogue, but really have been posturing for war and really kind of looking like conflict is going to be inevitable on both sides.

AMYGOODMAN: Iona Craig, I want to thank you for being with us, a journalist who was based in Sana’a for four years as the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London. She was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2014.

When we come back, we remember Danny Schechter, "The News Dissector." We’ll be speaking with the acclaimed South African journalist, filmmaker, Anant Singh, who made the film The Long Walk to Freedom, and Danny Schechter’s longtime colleague and friend, Rory O’Connor. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

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Mon, 23 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400Ex-U.S. Official: With Iran Letter, "Reckless" GOP Places Middle East Hegemony over Securityhttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/12/ex_us_official_with_iran_letter
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-12:en/story/e57a6e NERMEEN SHAIKH : We begin today&#8217;s show looking at the fallout from the open letter sent earlier this week by Republican lawmakers warning Iran against a nuclear deal with the U.S. On Monday, a group of 47 Republican senators released the letter, which reads in part, quote, &quot;we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei.&quot; Iran&#8217;s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, dismissed the letter as propaganda.
MOHAMMAD JAVAD ZARIF : [translated] This is a propaganda ploy and bears no legal value. This shows how worried one group is. There is no agreement in place yet, and one group is speaking about its content. In any case, a propaganda move has begun with Netanyahu&#8217;s address to Congress, and this is also another propaganda ploy. It&#8217;s regrettable that there is a group who are against reaching a deal. Of course, we insist that if we do reach a deal, it has to be one in which the rights of our people are observed, and we are sure that there are ways to achieve this result.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Zarif went on to warn, quote, &quot;if the next administration revokes any agreement with the stroke of a pen, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law.&quot; Secretary of State John Kerry responded to the letter on Wednesday.
SECRETARY OF STATE JOHN KERRY : My reaction to the letter was utter disbelief. During my 29 years here in the Senate, I never heard of nor even heard of it being proposed anything comparable to this. If I had, I can guarantee you, no matter what the issue and no matter who was president, I would have certainly rejected it. I think no one is questioning anybody&#8217;s right to dissent. Any senator can go to the floor any day and raise any of the questions that were raised in that. But to write to the leaders in the middle of a negotiation, particularly the leaders that they have criticized other people for even engaging with or writing to, to write them and suggest that they&#8217;re going to give a constitutional lesson, which, by the way, was absolutely incorrect, is quite stunning. This letter ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of American foreign policy.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : According to the website LobeLog, the senator who spearheaded the letter, freshman Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, received nearly $1 million in donations to his election campaign efforts last year from the Emergency Committee for Israel, run by neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol. The Intercept reports Cotton was set to appear at a secretive meeting of weapons contractors the day after sending the letter. Secretary of State John Kerry returns to Switzerland Sunday in a bid to reach a nuclear deal before a March 31st deadline.
AMY GOODMAN : To talk more about the letter and what&#8217;s at stake in the nuclear negotiations, we&#8217;re joined by two guests. Hillary Mann Leverett is with us, served as National Security Council—in the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 2001 to &#39;03, she was a U.S. negotiator with Iran on Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq, in which capacity she negotiated directly with Iran&#39;s present foreign minister, Javad Zarif. She is the CEO of the political risk consultancy firm Stratega. She will join Georgetown University as a visiting scholar next month. She&#8217;s co-author of Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran . Ali Gharib is also with us, contibutor to The Nation magazine. His most recent piece is headlined &quot;Meet Tom Cotton, the Senator Behind the Republicans&#8217; Letter to Iran.&quot;
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Hillary Mann Leverett, let&#8217;s begin with you. Talk about the significance and the effect of this letter. How unusual is it? Where was it sent? Who sent it?
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : It really is unprecedented, from as far as I can determine and as far as legal scholars that I&#8217;ve canvassed can determine. It is really unprecedented. It&#8217;s really tantamount, if you could imagine, during the 1960s, if the Republicans in Congress had then written to the Soviet leader Khrushchev warning him not to negotiate with Kennedy over the Cuban missile crisis because the United States would bomb the Soviet Union two years later if the Republicans won the election. It&#8217;s really tantamount to that kind of reckless interference and dangerous, reckless interference for U.S. interests. The effect here—the conventional wisdom, I think, in Washington is the effect has served to just portray the Republicans as somewhat ignorant—or really ignorant—and marginalized.
But I think it actually is having a little bit more of an effect that should be taken seriously. In that letter, the letter that Nermeen read the quote from, that specifically honed in on how the Republicans warned that this agreement would be just between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei, is very insignificant. Any agreement that would be reached between the United States and Iran, first of all, Secretary Kerry said yesterday before Congress, would not be legally binding. So, whether someone signs it, to begin with, is a question. But even if someone were to sign it, it would be Secretary Kerry, who&#8217;s been negotiating it for the United States, and it would be Foreign Minister Zarif on the Iranian side. It wouldn&#8217;t be Ayatollah Khamenei. I think that that letter was—that sentence was inserted to make this an issue of who is President Obama, really to get to the ethnic and identity issues that the Republicans, in particular, have been pressing here in Washington, that somehow this is about Islam and Islamic radicalism and Muslims, and to tie them into this package, as Prime Minister Netanyahu did when he came to Washington and made his speech equating the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Islamic State, that they are two sides of the same coin.
In that context, President Obama has been in some ways eerily silent, and I think this is a serious mistake. It behooves the president to make the case, the strategic case, to the American people why a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran is in America&#8217;s interest, not that we&#8217;re doing Iran a favor to welcome them back into the international community, instead that this is critically important for the United States, that after a decade of disastrous wars in the Middle East, we need a fundamentally different policy, and that starts with a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But I&#8217;m afraid the administration isn&#8217;t making that case, because they don&#8217;t want, in some ways, to be seen as liking the ayatollah or Islamists in Iran or elsewhere. And that&#8217;s going to be a problem going forward with any deal. Even if there is some sort of technical agreement by the end of the month, that&#8217;s going to be a problem going forward, the administration&#8217;s inability to embrace a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran—and I stress the Islamic Republic of Iran.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Hillary, some have suggested—even though Iran dismissed the letter as propaganda, some have suggested the letter may have made the U.S. appear an untrustworthy negotiating partner to Iran, thereby weakening the chances of reaching an agreement. Could you comment on that?
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : I think the chances of reaching an agreement, from the Iranian side, are actually quite high. I was in Iran in November. I went to—I was invited to address a conference at the University of Tehran—kind of funny, in a way—on the future of American executive-legislative relations in the wake of the midterm elections here and the capture of the Senate by the Republicans. So I think in Iran they have a very acute, sophisticated understanding of U.S. politics, and I think they went into these negotiations very clear-eyed. Foreign Minister Zarif, I liken him to the Kissinger, you know, of our times. He is a great statesman and a superlative strategist. The Iranians have gone into this negotiation very clear-eyed, without any mistaken wishful thinking that somehow Congress and the—particularly the pro-Israel lobby in Washington is going to embrace Iran. They went into this knowing what they were getting into. So I don&#8217;t think this is going to inhibit them in any way.
But they are certainly not going to—if there was any inclination to trust President Obama&#8217;s word or Secretary Kerry&#8217;s word, this letter certainly hurts that. They&#8217;re certainly not going to go down that road. I think they&#8217;re going to be even more focused on getting international guarantees—for example, through a United Nations Security Council resolution, through increased relations and cooperation agreements with Russia and China. Both the Russian and Chinese presidents will be visiting Iran this spring. So, Foreign Minister Zarif and, I think, the Iranian leadership, in their foreign policy and national security councils, they&#8217;re focused on getting what they want, they have a plan, and they&#8217;re not going to let these kind of Washington politics derail them.
AMY GOODMAN : Speaking Wednesday, Republican lawmakers defended their decision to sign the letter. This is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.
SEN . RAND PAUL : So why do I sign this letter? I sign this letter because I sign it to an administration that doesn&#8217;t listen, to an administration that, every turn, tries to go around Congress because you think you can&#8217;t get your way. The president says, &quot;Oh, the Congress won&#8217;t do what I want, so I&#8217;ve got to—I&#8217;ve got a pen, and I&#8217;ve got my phone. I&#8217;m going to do what I want.&quot; The letter was to you. The letter was to Iran, but it should have been cc&#8217;d to the White House, because the White House needs to understand that any agreement that removes or changes legislation will have to be passed by us.
AMY GOODMAN : So, Hillary Mann Leverett, if you can respond to what Senator Rand Paul, one of the signatories to this letter—47 Republican senators signed this letter—has said? And he&#8217;s particularly significant given that he could be a presidential contender in 2016. And so, in Iran&#8217;s eyes, he could be a person, if he were to become president, who would do just what the Republicans are threatening, that somehow they would unsign the agreement.
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : Yes, and also he has been somewhat of a different voice on the Republican side, certainly not someone who has been in lockstep with the neoconservatives here in Washington, something also that when I was in Iran was noticed. They understand what goes on in terms of American politics and who&#8217;s who in terms of candidates here and what they stand for. So it is particularly significant, this change, potentially, in Senator Paul&#8217;s position.
It&#8217;s also a little bit odd that you have Senator Paul not only lecturing—joining a letter to lecture Iran&#8217;s leaders, but now saying that in fact it should have been sent to the White House, where of course the president is not only a Harvard Law graduate but was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. And the last time I looked, you know, Senator Paul doesn&#8217;t have that kind of pedigree.
But even with that, I think what Senator Paul&#8217;s argument gets to, again, which is critically needed, is the administration has not made their case. President Obama has, at most, said, &quot;Well, this is 50-50,&quot; as if it&#8217;s a take-it-or-leave-it proposition to get an agreement with Iran. He has not made the case that we need it, in American interests, for a fundamentally different policy toward the Middle East that gets us off the trajectory for hegemony and dominance in the region, and instead allows a more natural balance of power in the region, where Iran can be a normal, strong state, to balance the reckless impulses of even some of our so-called allies, like the Saudis and even the Israelis. That&#8217;s critically important, but President Obama has not made that case. And so you&#8217;re seeing even someone like Senator Paul, who I think has had a more measured foreign policy approach than the neoconservatives in his party, come out to join this letter to demand, in a sense, that President Obama either make the case or come to Congress and let them do the foreign policy making.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Well, I want to turn to comments made by Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, the senator who spearheaded the letter to Iran. Just weeks into his first term in the Senate, he warned against a nuclear deal with Iran while speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
SEN . TOM COTTON : First, the goal of our policy must be clear: regime change in Iran. We cannot and will not be safe as long as Islamist despots rule in Iran. The policy of the United States should therefore be to support regime opponents and promote a constitutional government at peace with the United States, Israel and the world. The United States should cease all appeasement, conciliation and concessions towards Iran, starting with the sham nuclear negotiations. Certain voices call for congressional restraint, urging Congress not to act now, lest Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always absent moderates in Iran. But the end of these negotiations isn&#8217;t an unintended consequence of congressional action. It is very much an intended consequence, a feature, not a bug, so to speak. Third, congressional actions should start with crippling new sanctions against Iran. These sanctions should be immediate. They should not be contingent on further negotiations with Iran. On the contrary, Iran is achieving, through slow motion, all that it might want in a final deal, exploiting the Obama administration&#8217;s desperation to keep the negotiations alive and for a deal, any deal. It&#8217;s time for the responsible adults in both parties of Congress to stop this farce.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : That was Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who led efforts to have this letter signed and sent to Iran, and authored it. So, Ali Gharib, can you talk about who Tom Cotton is? Your recent piece is called &quot;Meet Tom Cotton, the Senator Behind the Republicans&#8217; Letter to Iran.&quot;
ALI GHARIB : Tom Cotton is himself a Harvard graduate and Harvard Law graduate, and he&#8217;s sort of gained conservative fame by calling in 2006 for James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times to be jailed for writing a story about how the U.S. tracks terrorism finances. And this was a sort of a young guy who&#8217;d left law school and he&#8217;d joined the military and was at the time deployed in Iraq. Now, that open letter that he wrote at the time—he&#8217;s a fan of the format—got the attention of Bill Kristol, who began meeting with Cotton when he was deployed stateside at Arlington National Cemetery in 2007. And they would, you know, according to The Atlantic , frequently go out for drinks together. And then, you know, over the next few years, they developed this relationship, years before Cotton entered politics. Eventually, he was elected to the House in 2012, spent two years there before becoming a freshman senator and immediately making a splash by distinguishing himself as the most hawkish member of an incredibly hawkish body.
And this letter is basically par for the course for him. It&#8217;s exactly what he&#8217;s trying to do, is end these—you know, you can just listen to Tom Cotton himself. He&#8217;s trying to end these negotiations. And he doesn&#8217;t quite say that the next step is military action, but it seems patently obvious that if you want U.S. policy to be regime change and you want them to have no nuclear program at all, there aren&#8217;t a lot of ways to accomplish that unless you&#8217;re going to attack them militarily. And so, this is basically the pattern. And it&#8217;s no surprise then that The Daily Beast reported that this letter was produced in conjunction with advice from Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol is a guy who&#8217;s called for attacking Iran for years now; literally maybe eight years he&#8217;s been calling for it publicly. And so, Tom Cotton has really been shepherded along. Nermeen, as you mentioned, he took in a million bucks for his campaign in ad buys from the Emergency Committee for Israel. These are exactly the type of neoconservative hawks who drove us into Iraq, and these are the people who have shepherded and really birthed Tom Cotton&#8217;s political career. It&#8217;s not a surprise that he&#8217;s here doing what he&#8217;s doing.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : So could you explain why these people and these institutions are opposed to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran? What&#8217;s at stake?
ALI GHARIB : Well, I think part of it is what Hillary was hinting at before, that there&#8217;s a balance of power in the region. Especially a lot of these people are sort of ultra-pro-Israel hawks. And there&#8217;s a balance of power that they don&#8217;t want to disrupt, where Israel maintains a sort of—its dominance over its part of the region. And the Israeli hawks, especially Netanyahu, who&#8217;s in power now, but pretty much the broad spectrum of Israeli political opinion, is against any sort of détente with Iran. They think Iran should just be isolated and crippled, sort of along—
AMY GOODMAN : No matter whether Netanyahu wins or loses next week in the Israeli election.
ALI GHARIB : Yeah, I mean, there&#8217;s broad consensus there that there&#8217;s—you know, it sort of ranges from a fear of any sort of nuclear deal to Iran to outright opposition to it. There&#8217;s nobody there that—there&#8217;s nobody in the Israeli political system that&#8217;s making any sort of argument about Iran. It&#8217;s not an election issue. People don&#8217;t talk about it, even the leader of the Zionist camp, Labor leader Bougie Herzog. It just doesn&#8217;t—Iran doesn&#8217;t come up. Everybody is sort of in step with Netanyahu on it. They might say that his tactics are wrong, but not his strategy and his goals.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, Bill Kristol is who said Iraq would be a cakewalk. He was the early big supporter of Sarah Palin.
ALI GHARIB : Right, this is kind of his record, is the combination of disastrous and unnecessary foreign wars and pushing sort of clownish political candidates who will help him carry out this agenda.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, Hillary Mann Leverett, can you talk about who is negotiating this deal—I mean, if you read the letter from the 47 senators, it looks as if this is a deal between the United States and Iran—but in fact who the countries are, and also, interestingly, that right now Iran is helping the Iraqi military defeat the so-called Islamic State?
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : Yes, but if I can just come back to a point that you were just discussing with Ali that I think is very important in terms of the balance of power in the region, you know, in the 1980s, the Israelis were not at all concerned about Iran&#8217;s nuclear program. They weren&#8217;t at all concerned about many of Iran&#8217;s other activities that they now profess concern about. In fact, in the 1980s, the United States wanted to impose sections on Iran for our concern about their connection to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. And the then Israeli government, in a live interview by the then Minister Ariel Sharon, said that Israel would oppose sanctions being—they would oppose sanctions being imposed on Iran. That changes in 1990, not because of any change in Iranian behavior, but because the Iraqi military was essentially taken out after the invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. routing of Iraq from Kuwait. Literally six months after that, in early 1992, you have the first visit to Washington by then Prime Minister Rabin, who&#8217;s considered more dovish than the current prime minister, Netanyahu, and it was then that Rabin started to raise concerns about Iran&#8217;s nuclear program and the prospect of sanctions. And it was then, in 1995, that the United States first imposes its comprehensive economic embargo on Iran. So I think it&#8217;s important to understand that even though Prime Minister Netanyahu&#8217;s rhetoric is very vitriolic, there is something deeper in terms of Israeli concerns about the rise of Iran in the region, that could check Israel&#8217;s, what I would call, reckless impulses vis-à-vis its neighbors.
With that said, I think the change in the balance of power is already happening in the region, and it&#8217;s something where, to me, it seems a bit underscored by the desperation in Netanyahu&#8217;s rhetoric and the desperation in the rhetoric of this letter by Senator Cotton. The balance of power in the region has already changed, where you have Iran&#8217;s influence in Iraq is now being recognized as not a bad thing by the American general, Dempsey, yesterday before Congress. Iran&#8217;s influence in countries as far afield from Iran as Yemen is now recognized and not seen as necessarily a bad thing. Some in Washington would prefer there to be Iranian influence in Yemen than al-Qaeda controlling Yemen. So there&#8217;s already a change in the regional balance of power, and around the world, that I think the United States is perhaps, in an unacknowledged way, going—accepting in some form.
That comes into play with the negotiations with Iran. Even though they appear right now to be very focused on the U.S.-Iranian part, they do very much include the other members of the permanent—of the Security Council plus Germany. And in the Security Council, I think two of the most important players on the Iran issue are Russia and China. Now, they haven&#8217;t been very vocal in terms of what their demands are in the negotiations, but they&#8217;re going to be critically important for Iran going forward, not because of some military or nefarious reason, but because, particularly for China, as China is looking to, in a lot of ways, re-establish their Silk Road and balance against the U.S. encroachment toward them in East Asia by trying to re-establish this Silk Road, looking west into Central Asia and toward Iran, Iran is critically important. And I think we&#8217;re going to see an historic visit by China&#8217;s President Xi to Iran in May. So there certainly are a lot of other players, important players, here. And I think Secretary Kerry, in some ways, is doing a good job trying to juggle all those pieces and re-orient the United States toward a fundamentally new world, where the balance of power in the Middle East is already changing, the balance of power around the world is already changing, and the United States must accommodate itself to that.
AMY GOODMAN : And the U.S. being on the same side as Iran when it comes to the Islamic State?
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : Yes. I mean, you know, in a different balance of power, where the United States is not seeking hegemony and dominance in the Middle East, where we&#8217;re not seeking to impose political outcomes or regimes in these various countries, in that kind of scenario, where the United States is not seeking all-out dominance and hegemony, Iran has to be an important—not just an important player, but an important partner. And, you know, I think American administrations have recognized that before. They certainly recognized that under the Shah&#8217;s Iran. But the Shah&#8217;s Iran was fundamentally unstable because it wasn&#8217;t representative.
What&#8217;s so important about Iran today as the Islamic republic, that we, many in Washington, in particular, don&#8217;t like, but is so important, is that it is pursuing an independent foreign policy, and it has an indigenously created, and therefore much more legitimate, political order—with all its flaws. It&#8217;s indigenously created, and therefore has an inherent legitimacy that a lot of the other political orders don&#8217;t. The focus on foreign policy independence, it may sound counterintuitive, but that&#8217;s precisely what the United States needs. We do not need, as Senator Cotton was advocating, yet another puppet government portending to carry forth American interests that are really contrary to America&#8217;s real interests, which would be for peace and stability in the region.
AMY GOODMAN : We are going to leave it—
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : If a country—I&#8217;m sorry.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there, but I thank you very much, Hillary Mann Leverett, for joining us—
HILLARY MANN LEVERETT : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : —who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 2001 to &#39;03, she was U.S. negotiator with Iran. She&#39;s co-author of the book Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran . And thanks so much to Ali Gharib, who is the contributor to The Nation magazine. We will link to your piece , &quot;Meet Tom Cotton, the Senator Behind the Republicans&#8217; Letter to Iran,&quot; as well as your other articles on Iran.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, we&#8217;re going to Ferguson, where two police officers have been shot. They are in serious condition. It is not clear who shot them. A news conference will be held soon. Also, the police chief of Ferguson has resigned. Stay with us. NERMEENSHAIKH: We begin today’s show looking at the fallout from the open letter sent earlier this week by Republican lawmakers warning Iran against a nuclear deal with the U.S. On Monday, a group of 47 Republican senators released the letter, which reads in part, quote, "we will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei." Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, dismissed the letter as propaganda.

MOHAMMADJAVADZARIF: [translated] This is a propaganda ploy and bears no legal value. This shows how worried one group is. There is no agreement in place yet, and one group is speaking about its content. In any case, a propaganda move has begun with Netanyahu’s address to Congress, and this is also another propaganda ploy. It’s regrettable that there is a group who are against reaching a deal. Of course, we insist that if we do reach a deal, it has to be one in which the rights of our people are observed, and we are sure that there are ways to achieve this result.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Zarif went on to warn, quote, "if the next administration revokes any agreement with the stroke of a pen, as they boast, it will have simply committed a blatant violation of international law." Secretary of State John Kerry responded to the letter on Wednesday.

SECRETARY OF STATEJOHNKERRY: My reaction to the letter was utter disbelief. During my 29 years here in the Senate, I never heard of nor even heard of it being proposed anything comparable to this. If I had, I can guarantee you, no matter what the issue and no matter who was president, I would have certainly rejected it. I think no one is questioning anybody’s right to dissent. Any senator can go to the floor any day and raise any of the questions that were raised in that. But to write to the leaders in the middle of a negotiation, particularly the leaders that they have criticized other people for even engaging with or writing to, to write them and suggest that they’re going to give a constitutional lesson, which, by the way, was absolutely incorrect, is quite stunning. This letter ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of American foreign policy.

NERMEENSHAIKH: According to the website LobeLog, the senator who spearheaded the letter, freshman Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, received nearly $1 million in donations to his election campaign efforts last year from the Emergency Committee for Israel, run by neoconservative pundit Bill Kristol. The Intercept reports Cotton was set to appear at a secretive meeting of weapons contractors the day after sending the letter. Secretary of State John Kerry returns to Switzerland Sunday in a bid to reach a nuclear deal before a March 31st deadline.

AMYGOODMAN: To talk more about the letter and what’s at stake in the nuclear negotiations, we’re joined by two guests. Hillary Mann Leverett is with us, served as National Security Council—in the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 2001 to '03, she was a U.S. negotiator with Iran on Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq, in which capacity she negotiated directly with Iran's present foreign minister, Javad Zarif. She is the CEO of the political risk consultancy firm Stratega. She will join Georgetown University as a visiting scholar next month. She’s co-author of Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ali Gharib is also with us, contibutor to The Nation magazine. His most recent piece is headlined "Meet Tom Cotton, the Senator Behind the Republicans’ Letter to Iran."

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Hillary Mann Leverett, let’s begin with you. Talk about the significance and the effect of this letter. How unusual is it? Where was it sent? Who sent it?

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: It really is unprecedented, from as far as I can determine and as far as legal scholars that I’ve canvassed can determine. It is really unprecedented. It’s really tantamount, if you could imagine, during the 1960s, if the Republicans in Congress had then written to the Soviet leader Khrushchev warning him not to negotiate with Kennedy over the Cuban missile crisis because the United States would bomb the Soviet Union two years later if the Republicans won the election. It’s really tantamount to that kind of reckless interference and dangerous, reckless interference for U.S. interests. The effect here—the conventional wisdom, I think, in Washington is the effect has served to just portray the Republicans as somewhat ignorant—or really ignorant—and marginalized.

But I think it actually is having a little bit more of an effect that should be taken seriously. In that letter, the letter that Nermeen read the quote from, that specifically honed in on how the Republicans warned that this agreement would be just between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei, is very insignificant. Any agreement that would be reached between the United States and Iran, first of all, Secretary Kerry said yesterday before Congress, would not be legally binding. So, whether someone signs it, to begin with, is a question. But even if someone were to sign it, it would be Secretary Kerry, who’s been negotiating it for the United States, and it would be Foreign Minister Zarif on the Iranian side. It wouldn’t be Ayatollah Khamenei. I think that that letter was—that sentence was inserted to make this an issue of who is President Obama, really to get to the ethnic and identity issues that the Republicans, in particular, have been pressing here in Washington, that somehow this is about Islam and Islamic radicalism and Muslims, and to tie them into this package, as Prime Minister Netanyahu did when he came to Washington and made his speech equating the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Islamic State, that they are two sides of the same coin.

In that context, President Obama has been in some ways eerily silent, and I think this is a serious mistake. It behooves the president to make the case, the strategic case, to the American people why a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran is in America’s interest, not that we’re doing Iran a favor to welcome them back into the international community, instead that this is critically important for the United States, that after a decade of disastrous wars in the Middle East, we need a fundamentally different policy, and that starts with a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran. But I’m afraid the administration isn’t making that case, because they don’t want, in some ways, to be seen as liking the ayatollah or Islamists in Iran or elsewhere. And that’s going to be a problem going forward with any deal. Even if there is some sort of technical agreement by the end of the month, that’s going to be a problem going forward, the administration’s inability to embrace a fundamentally different relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran—and I stress the Islamic Republic of Iran.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Hillary, some have suggested—even though Iran dismissed the letter as propaganda, some have suggested the letter may have made the U.S. appear an untrustworthy negotiating partner to Iran, thereby weakening the chances of reaching an agreement. Could you comment on that?

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: I think the chances of reaching an agreement, from the Iranian side, are actually quite high. I was in Iran in November. I went to—I was invited to address a conference at the University of Tehran—kind of funny, in a way—on the future of American executive-legislative relations in the wake of the midterm elections here and the capture of the Senate by the Republicans. So I think in Iran they have a very acute, sophisticated understanding of U.S. politics, and I think they went into these negotiations very clear-eyed. Foreign Minister Zarif, I liken him to the Kissinger, you know, of our times. He is a great statesman and a superlative strategist. The Iranians have gone into this negotiation very clear-eyed, without any mistaken wishful thinking that somehow Congress and the—particularly the pro-Israel lobby in Washington is going to embrace Iran. They went into this knowing what they were getting into. So I don’t think this is going to inhibit them in any way.

But they are certainly not going to—if there was any inclination to trust President Obama’s word or Secretary Kerry’s word, this letter certainly hurts that. They’re certainly not going to go down that road. I think they’re going to be even more focused on getting international guarantees—for example, through a United Nations Security Council resolution, through increased relations and cooperation agreements with Russia and China. Both the Russian and Chinese presidents will be visiting Iran this spring. So, Foreign Minister Zarif and, I think, the Iranian leadership, in their foreign policy and national security councils, they’re focused on getting what they want, they have a plan, and they’re not going to let these kind of Washington politics derail them.

AMYGOODMAN: Speaking Wednesday, Republican lawmakers defended their decision to sign the letter. This is Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky.

SEN. RANDPAUL: So why do I sign this letter? I sign this letter because I sign it to an administration that doesn’t listen, to an administration that, every turn, tries to go around Congress because you think you can’t get your way. The president says, "Oh, the Congress won’t do what I want, so I’ve got to—I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got my phone. I’m going to do what I want." The letter was to you. The letter was to Iran, but it should have been cc’d to the White House, because the White House needs to understand that any agreement that removes or changes legislation will have to be passed by us.

AMYGOODMAN: So, Hillary Mann Leverett, if you can respond to what Senator Rand Paul, one of the signatories to this letter—47 Republican senators signed this letter—has said? And he’s particularly significant given that he could be a presidential contender in 2016. And so, in Iran’s eyes, he could be a person, if he were to become president, who would do just what the Republicans are threatening, that somehow they would unsign the agreement.

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: Yes, and also he has been somewhat of a different voice on the Republican side, certainly not someone who has been in lockstep with the neoconservatives here in Washington, something also that when I was in Iran was noticed. They understand what goes on in terms of American politics and who’s who in terms of candidates here and what they stand for. So it is particularly significant, this change, potentially, in Senator Paul’s position.

It’s also a little bit odd that you have Senator Paul not only lecturing—joining a letter to lecture Iran’s leaders, but now saying that in fact it should have been sent to the White House, where of course the president is not only a Harvard Law graduate but was a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. And the last time I looked, you know, Senator Paul doesn’t have that kind of pedigree.

But even with that, I think what Senator Paul’s argument gets to, again, which is critically needed, is the administration has not made their case. President Obama has, at most, said, "Well, this is 50-50," as if it’s a take-it-or-leave-it proposition to get an agreement with Iran. He has not made the case that we need it, in American interests, for a fundamentally different policy toward the Middle East that gets us off the trajectory for hegemony and dominance in the region, and instead allows a more natural balance of power in the region, where Iran can be a normal, strong state, to balance the reckless impulses of even some of our so-called allies, like the Saudis and even the Israelis. That’s critically important, but President Obama has not made that case. And so you’re seeing even someone like Senator Paul, who I think has had a more measured foreign policy approach than the neoconservatives in his party, come out to join this letter to demand, in a sense, that President Obama either make the case or come to Congress and let them do the foreign policy making.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Well, I want to turn to comments made by Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton, the senator who spearheaded the letter to Iran. Just weeks into his first term in the Senate, he warned against a nuclear deal with Iran while speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

SEN. TOMCOTTON: First, the goal of our policy must be clear: regime change in Iran. We cannot and will not be safe as long as Islamist despots rule in Iran. The policy of the United States should therefore be to support regime opponents and promote a constitutional government at peace with the United States, Israel and the world. The United States should cease all appeasement, conciliation and concessions towards Iran, starting with the sham nuclear negotiations. Certain voices call for congressional restraint, urging Congress not to act now, lest Iran walk away from the negotiating table, undermining the fabled yet always absent moderates in Iran. But the end of these negotiations isn’t an unintended consequence of congressional action. It is very much an intended consequence, a feature, not a bug, so to speak. Third, congressional actions should start with crippling new sanctions against Iran. These sanctions should be immediate. They should not be contingent on further negotiations with Iran. On the contrary, Iran is achieving, through slow motion, all that it might want in a final deal, exploiting the Obama administration’s desperation to keep the negotiations alive and for a deal, any deal. It’s time for the responsible adults in both parties of Congress to stop this farce.

NERMEENSHAIKH: That was Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who led efforts to have this letter signed and sent to Iran, and authored it. So, Ali Gharib, can you talk about who Tom Cotton is? Your recent piece is called "Meet Tom Cotton, the Senator Behind the Republicans’ Letter to Iran."

ALIGHARIB: Tom Cotton is himself a Harvard graduate and Harvard Law graduate, and he’s sort of gained conservative fame by calling in 2006 for James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times to be jailed for writing a story about how the U.S. tracks terrorism finances. And this was a sort of a young guy who’d left law school and he’d joined the military and was at the time deployed in Iraq. Now, that open letter that he wrote at the time—he’s a fan of the format—got the attention of Bill Kristol, who began meeting with Cotton when he was deployed stateside at Arlington National Cemetery in 2007. And they would, you know, according to The Atlantic, frequently go out for drinks together. And then, you know, over the next few years, they developed this relationship, years before Cotton entered politics. Eventually, he was elected to the House in 2012, spent two years there before becoming a freshman senator and immediately making a splash by distinguishing himself as the most hawkish member of an incredibly hawkish body.

And this letter is basically par for the course for him. It’s exactly what he’s trying to do, is end these—you know, you can just listen to Tom Cotton himself. He’s trying to end these negotiations. And he doesn’t quite say that the next step is military action, but it seems patently obvious that if you want U.S. policy to be regime change and you want them to have no nuclear program at all, there aren’t a lot of ways to accomplish that unless you’re going to attack them militarily. And so, this is basically the pattern. And it’s no surprise then that The Daily Beast reported that this letter was produced in conjunction with advice from Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol is a guy who’s called for attacking Iran for years now; literally maybe eight years he’s been calling for it publicly. And so, Tom Cotton has really been shepherded along. Nermeen, as you mentioned, he took in a million bucks for his campaign in ad buys from the Emergency Committee for Israel. These are exactly the type of neoconservative hawks who drove us into Iraq, and these are the people who have shepherded and really birthed Tom Cotton’s political career. It’s not a surprise that he’s here doing what he’s doing.

NERMEENSHAIKH: So could you explain why these people and these institutions are opposed to reaching a nuclear deal with Iran? What’s at stake?

ALIGHARIB: Well, I think part of it is what Hillary was hinting at before, that there’s a balance of power in the region. Especially a lot of these people are sort of ultra-pro-Israel hawks. And there’s a balance of power that they don’t want to disrupt, where Israel maintains a sort of—its dominance over its part of the region. And the Israeli hawks, especially Netanyahu, who’s in power now, but pretty much the broad spectrum of Israeli political opinion, is against any sort of détente with Iran. They think Iran should just be isolated and crippled, sort of along—

AMYGOODMAN: No matter whether Netanyahu wins or loses next week in the Israeli election.

ALIGHARIB: Yeah, I mean, there’s broad consensus there that there’s—you know, it sort of ranges from a fear of any sort of nuclear deal to Iran to outright opposition to it. There’s nobody there that—there’s nobody in the Israeli political system that’s making any sort of argument about Iran. It’s not an election issue. People don’t talk about it, even the leader of the Zionist camp, Labor leader Bougie Herzog. It just doesn’t—Iran doesn’t come up. Everybody is sort of in step with Netanyahu on it. They might say that his tactics are wrong, but not his strategy and his goals.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, Bill Kristol is who said Iraq would be a cakewalk. He was the early big supporter of Sarah Palin.

ALIGHARIB: Right, this is kind of his record, is the combination of disastrous and unnecessary foreign wars and pushing sort of clownish political candidates who will help him carry out this agenda.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, Hillary Mann Leverett, can you talk about who is negotiating this deal—I mean, if you read the letter from the 47 senators, it looks as if this is a deal between the United States and Iran—but in fact who the countries are, and also, interestingly, that right now Iran is helping the Iraqi military defeat the so-called Islamic State?

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: Yes, but if I can just come back to a point that you were just discussing with Ali that I think is very important in terms of the balance of power in the region, you know, in the 1980s, the Israelis were not at all concerned about Iran’s nuclear program. They weren’t at all concerned about many of Iran’s other activities that they now profess concern about. In fact, in the 1980s, the United States wanted to impose sections on Iran for our concern about their connection to the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. And the then Israeli government, in a live interview by the then Minister Ariel Sharon, said that Israel would oppose sanctions being—they would oppose sanctions being imposed on Iran. That changes in 1990, not because of any change in Iranian behavior, but because the Iraqi military was essentially taken out after the invasion of Kuwait and the U.S. routing of Iraq from Kuwait. Literally six months after that, in early 1992, you have the first visit to Washington by then Prime Minister Rabin, who’s considered more dovish than the current prime minister, Netanyahu, and it was then that Rabin started to raise concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and the prospect of sanctions. And it was then, in 1995, that the United States first imposes its comprehensive economic embargo on Iran. So I think it’s important to understand that even though Prime Minister Netanyahu’s rhetoric is very vitriolic, there is something deeper in terms of Israeli concerns about the rise of Iran in the region, that could check Israel’s, what I would call, reckless impulses vis-à-vis its neighbors.

With that said, I think the change in the balance of power is already happening in the region, and it’s something where, to me, it seems a bit underscored by the desperation in Netanyahu’s rhetoric and the desperation in the rhetoric of this letter by Senator Cotton. The balance of power in the region has already changed, where you have Iran’s influence in Iraq is now being recognized as not a bad thing by the American general, Dempsey, yesterday before Congress. Iran’s influence in countries as far afield from Iran as Yemen is now recognized and not seen as necessarily a bad thing. Some in Washington would prefer there to be Iranian influence in Yemen than al-Qaeda controlling Yemen. So there’s already a change in the regional balance of power, and around the world, that I think the United States is perhaps, in an unacknowledged way, going—accepting in some form.

That comes into play with the negotiations with Iran. Even though they appear right now to be very focused on the U.S.-Iranian part, they do very much include the other members of the permanent—of the Security Council plus Germany. And in the Security Council, I think two of the most important players on the Iran issue are Russia and China. Now, they haven’t been very vocal in terms of what their demands are in the negotiations, but they’re going to be critically important for Iran going forward, not because of some military or nefarious reason, but because, particularly for China, as China is looking to, in a lot of ways, re-establish their Silk Road and balance against the U.S. encroachment toward them in East Asia by trying to re-establish this Silk Road, looking west into Central Asia and toward Iran, Iran is critically important. And I think we’re going to see an historic visit by China’s President Xi to Iran in May. So there certainly are a lot of other players, important players, here. And I think Secretary Kerry, in some ways, is doing a good job trying to juggle all those pieces and re-orient the United States toward a fundamentally new world, where the balance of power in the Middle East is already changing, the balance of power around the world is already changing, and the United States must accommodate itself to that.

AMYGOODMAN: And the U.S. being on the same side as Iran when it comes to the Islamic State?

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: Yes. I mean, you know, in a different balance of power, where the United States is not seeking hegemony and dominance in the Middle East, where we’re not seeking to impose political outcomes or regimes in these various countries, in that kind of scenario, where the United States is not seeking all-out dominance and hegemony, Iran has to be an important—not just an important player, but an important partner. And, you know, I think American administrations have recognized that before. They certainly recognized that under the Shah’s Iran. But the Shah’s Iran was fundamentally unstable because it wasn’t representative.

What’s so important about Iran today as the Islamic republic, that we, many in Washington, in particular, don’t like, but is so important, is that it is pursuing an independent foreign policy, and it has an indigenously created, and therefore much more legitimate, political order—with all its flaws. It’s indigenously created, and therefore has an inherent legitimacy that a lot of the other political orders don’t. The focus on foreign policy independence, it may sound counterintuitive, but that’s precisely what the United States needs. We do not need, as Senator Cotton was advocating, yet another puppet government portending to carry forth American interests that are really contrary to America’s real interests, which would be for peace and stability in the region.

AMYGOODMAN: We are going to leave it—

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: If a country—I’m sorry.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but I thank you very much, Hillary Mann Leverett, for joining us—

HILLARYMANNLEVERETT: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: —who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Clinton and Bush. From 2001 to '03, she was U.S. negotiator with Iran. She's co-author of the book Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran. And thanks so much to Ali Gharib, who is the contributor to The Nation magazine. We will link to your piece, "Meet Tom Cotton, the Senator Behind the Republicans’ Letter to Iran," as well as your other articles on Iran.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to Ferguson, where two police officers have been shot. They are in serious condition. It is not clear who shot them. A news conference will be held soon. Also, the police chief of Ferguson has resigned. Stay with us.

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Thu, 12 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0400Noam Chomsky: Opposing Iran Nuclear Deal, Israel's Goal Isn't Survival -- It's Regional Dominancehttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/2/noam_chomsky_opposing_iran_nuclear_deal
tag:democracynow.org,2015-03-02:en/story/477c3b AARON MATÉ: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu will address the lobby group AIPAC today, followed by a controversial speech before Congress on Tuesday. The visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31st deadline. At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Netanyahu&#8217;s trip won&#8217;t threaten the outcome.
PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST : I think the short answer to that is: I don&#8217;t think so. And the reason is simply that there is a real opportunity for us here. And the president is hopeful that we are going to have an opportunity to do what is clearly in the best interests of the United States and Israel, which is to resolve the international community&#8217;s concerns about Iran&#8217;s nuclear program at the negotiating table.
AARON MATÉ: The trip has sparked the worst public rift between the U.S. and Israel in over two decades. Dozens of Democrats could boycott Netanyahu&#8217;s address to Congress, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. The Obama administration will send two officials, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to address the AIPAC summit today. This comes just days after Rice called Netanyahu&#8217;s visit, quote, &quot;destructive.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also facing domestic criticism for his unconventional Washington visit, which comes just two weeks before an election in which he seeks a third term in Israel. On Sunday, a group representing nearly 200 of Israel&#8217;s top retired military and intelligence officials accused Netanyahu of assaulting the U.S.-Israel alliance.
But despite talk of a U.S. and Israeli dispute, the Obama administration has taken pains to display its staunch support for the Israeli government. Speaking just today in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for what he called an &quot;obsession&quot; and &quot;bias&quot; against Israel. The council is expected to release a report in the coming weeks on potential war crimes in Israel&#8217;s U.S.-backed Gaza assault last summer.
For more, we spend the hour today with world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Noam Chomsky. He has written over a hundred books, most recently On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare . His forthcoming book, co-authored with Ilan Pappé, is titled On Palestine and will be out next month. Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he&#8217;s taught for more than 50 years.
Noam Chomsky, it&#8217;s great to have you back here at Democracy Now! , and particularly in our very snowy outside, but warm inside, New York studio.
NOAM CHOMSKY : Delighted to be here again.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Noam, let&#8217;s start with Netanyahu&#8217;s visit. He is set to make this unprecedented joint address to Congress, unprecedented because of the kind of rift it has demonstrated between the Republicans and the Democratic president, President Obama. Can you talk about its significance?
NOAM CHOMSKY : For both president—Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran. They have a common interest in ensuring that there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region. And it is—if we believe U.S. intelligence—don&#8217;t see any reason not to—their analysis is that if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which they don&#8217;t know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Now, their general strategic posture is one of deterrence. They have low military expenditures. According to U.S. intelligence, their strategic doctrine is to try to prevent an attack, up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don&#8217;t think anyone with a grey cell functioning thinks that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon, or even try to. The country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But they might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don&#8217;t want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and aggression in the region and don&#8217;t want any impediment to that.
And for the Republicans in Congress, there&#8217;s another interest—namely, to undermine anything that Obama, you know, the entity Christ, might try to do. So that&#8217;s a separate issue there. The Republicans stopped being an ordinary parliamentary party some years ago. They were described, I think accurately, by Norman Ornstein, the very respected conservative political analyst, American Enterprise Institute; he said the party has become a radical insurgency which has abandoned any commitment to parliamentary democracy. And their goal for the last years has simply been to undermine anything that Obama might do, in an effort to regain power and serve their primary constituency, which is the very wealthy and the corporate sector. They try to conceal this with all sorts of other means. In doing so, they&#8217;ve had to—you can&#8217;t get votes that way, so they&#8217;ve had to mobilize sectors of the population which have always been there but were never mobilized into an organized political force: evangelical Christians, extreme nationalists, terrified people who have to carry guns into Starbucks because somebody might be after them, and so on and so forth. That&#8217;s a big force. And inspiring fear is not very difficult in the United States. It&#8217;s a long history, back to colonial times, of—as an extremely frightened society, which is an interesting story in itself. And mobilizing people in fear of them, whoever &quot;them&quot; happens to be, is an effective technique used over and over again. And right now, the Republicans have—their nonpolicy has succeeded in putting them back in a position of at least congressional power. So, the attack on—this is a personal attack on Obama, and intended that way, is simply part of that general effort. But there is a common strategic concern underlying it, I think, and that is pretty much what U.S. intelligence analyzes: preventing any deterrent in the region to U.S. and Israeli actions.
AARON MATÉ: You say that nobody with a grey cell thinks that Iran would launch a strike, were it to have nuclear weapons, but yet Netanyahu repeatedly accuses Iran of planning a new genocide against the Jewish people. He said this most recently on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, saying that the ayatollahs are planning a new holocaust against us. And that&#8217;s an argument that&#8217;s taken seriously here.
NOAM CHOMSKY : It&#8217;s taken seriously by people who don&#8217;t stop to think for a minute. But again, Iran is under extremely close surveillance. U.S. satellite surveillance knows everything that&#8217;s going on in Iran. If Iran even began to load a missile—that is, to bring a missile near a weapon—the country would probably be wiped out. And whatever you think about the clerics, the Guardian Council and so on, there&#8217;s no indication that they&#8217;re suicidal.
AARON MATÉ: The premise of these talks—Iran gets to enrich uranium in return for lifting of U.S. sanctions—do you see that as a fair parameter? Does the U.S. have the right, to begin with, to be imposing sanctions on Iran?
NOAM CHOMSKY : No, it doesn&#8217;t. What are the right to impose sanctions? Iran should be imposing sanctions on us. I mean, it&#8217;s worth remembering—when you hear the White House spokesman talk about the international community, it wants Iran to do this and that, it&#8217;s important to remember that the phrase &quot;international community&quot; in U.S. discourse refers to the United States and anybody who may be happening to go along with it. That&#8217;s the international community. If the international community is the world, it&#8217;s quite a different story. So, two years ago, the Non-Aligned—former Non-Aligned Movement—it&#8217;s a large majority of the population of the world—had their regular conference in Iran in Tehran. And they, once again, vigorously supported Iran&#8217;s right to develop nuclear power as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That&#8217;s the international community. The United States and its allies are outliers, as is usually the case.
And as far as sanctions are concerned, it&#8217;s worth bearing in mind that it&#8217;s now 60 years since—during the past 60 years, not a day has passed without the U.S. torturing the people of Iran. It began with overthrowing the parliamentary regime and installing a tyrant, the shah, supporting the shah through very serious human rights abuses and terror and violence. As soon as he was overthrown, almost instantly the United States turned to supporting Iraq&#8217;s attack against Iran, which was a brutal and violent attack. U.S. provided critical support for it, pretty much won the war for Iraq by entering directly at the end. After the war was over, the U.S. instantly supported the sanctions against Iran. And though this is kind of suppressed, it&#8217;s important. This is George H.W. Bush now. He was in love with Saddam Hussein. He authorized further aid to Saddam in opposition to the Treasury and others. He sent a presidential delegation—a congressional delegation to Iran. It was April 1990—1989, headed by Bob Dole, the congressional—
AMY GOODMAN : To Iraq? Sent to Iraq?
NOAM CHOMSKY : To Iraq. To Iraq, sorry, yeah—to offer his greetings to Saddam, his friend, to assure him that he should disregard critical comment that he hears in the American media: We have this free press thing here, and we can&#8217;t shut them up. But they said they would take off from Voice of America, take off critics of their friend Saddam. That was—he invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. This is right after the Iraq-Iran War, along with sanctions against Iran. And then it continues without a break up to the present.
There have been repeated opportunities for a settlement of whatever the issues are. And so, for example, in, I guess it was, 2010, an agreement was reached between Brazil, Turkey and Iran for Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium for storage elsewhere—Turkey—and in return, the West would provide the isotopes that Iran needs for its medical reactors. When that agreement was reached, it was bitterly condemned in the United States by the president, by Congress, by the media. Brazil was attacked for breaking ranks and so on. The Brazilian foreign minister was sufficiently annoyed so that he released a letter from Obama to Brazil proposing exactly that agreement, presumably on the assumption that Iran wouldn&#8217;t accept it. When they did accept it, they had to be attacked for daring to accept it.
And 2012, 2012, you know, there was to be a meeting in Finland, December, to take steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. This is an old request, pushed initially by Egypt and the other Arab states back in the early &#39;90s. There&#39;s so much support for it that the U.S. formally agrees, but not in fact, and has repeatedly tried to undermine it. This is under the U.N. auspices, and the meeting was supposed to take place in December. Israel announced that they would not attend. The question on everyone&#8217;s mind is: How will Iran react? They said that they would attend unconditionally. A couple of days later, Obama canceled the meeting, claiming the situation is not right for it and so on. But that would be—even steps in that direction would be an important move towards eliminating whatever issue there might be. Of course, the stumbling block is that there is one major nuclear state: Israel. And if there&#8217;s a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, there would be inspections, and neither Israel nor the United States will tolerate that.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to ask you about major revelations that have been described as the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. Last week, Al Jazeera started publishing a series of spy cables from the world&#8217;s top intelligence agencies. In one cable, the Israeli spy agency Mossad contradicts Prime Minister Netanyahu&#8217;s own dire warnings about Iran&#8217;s ability to produce a nuclear bomb within a year. In a report to South African counterparts in October 2012, the Israeli Mossad concluded Iran is &quot;not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons.&quot; The assessment was sent just weeks after Netanyahu went before the U.N. General Assembly with a far different message. Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate what he called Iran&#8217;s alleged progress on a nuclear weapon.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU : This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In the case of Iran&#8217;s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages. By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it&#8217;s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before—before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2012. The Mossad assessment contradicting Netanyahu was sent just weeks after, but it was likely written earlier. It said Iran, quote, &quot;does not appear to be ready,&quot; unquote, to enrich uranium to the highest levels needed for a nuclear weapon. A bomb would require 90 percent enrichment, but Mossad found Iran had only enriched to 20 percent. That number was later reduced under an interim nuclear deal the following year. The significance of this, Noam Chomsky, as Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares for this joint address before Congress to undermine a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal?
NOAM CHOMSKY : Well, the striking aspect of this is the chutzpah involved. I mean, Israel has had nuclear weapons for probably 50 years or 40 years. They have, estimates are, maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. And they are an aggressive state. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times. It&#8217;s carrying out an illegal occupation that carries out brutal attacks like Gaza last summer. And they have nuclear weapons. But the main story is that if—incidentally, the Mossad analysis corresponds to U.S. intelligence analysis. They don&#8217;t know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But I think the crucial fact is that even if they were, what would it mean? It would be just as U.S. intelligence analyzes it: It would be part of a deterrent strategy. They couldn&#8217;t use a nuclear weapon. They couldn&#8217;t even threaten to use it. Israel, on the other hand, can; has, in fact, threatened the use of nuclear weapons a number of times.
AMY GOODMAN : So why is Netanyahu doing this?
NOAM CHOMSKY : Because he doesn&#8217;t want to have a deterrent in the region. That&#8217;s simple enough. If you&#8217;re an aggressive, violent state, you want to be able to use force freely. You don&#8217;t want anything that might impede it.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you think this in any way has undercut the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Netanyahu-Obama conflict that, what, Susan Rice has called destructive?
NOAM CHOMSKY : There is undoubtedly a personal relationship which is hostile, but that&#8217;s happened before. Back in around 1990 under first President Bush, James Baker went as far as—the secretary of state—telling Israel, &quot;We&#8217;re not going to talk to you anymore. If you want to contact me, here&#8217;s my phone number.&quot; And, in fact, the U.S. imposed mild sanctions on Israel, enough to compel the prime minister to resign and be replaced by someone else. But that didn&#8217;t change the relationship, which is based on deeper issues than personal antagonisms. AARON MATÉ: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu will address the lobby group AIPAC today, followed by a controversial speech before Congress on Tuesday. The visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31st deadline. At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Netanyahu’s trip won’t threaten the outcome.

PRESSSECRETARYJOSHEARNEST: I think the short answer to that is: I don’t think so. And the reason is simply that there is a real opportunity for us here. And the president is hopeful that we are going to have an opportunity to do what is clearly in the best interests of the United States and Israel, which is to resolve the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program at the negotiating table.

AARON MATÉ: The trip has sparked the worst public rift between the U.S. and Israel in over two decades. Dozens of Democrats could boycott Netanyahu’s address to Congress, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. The Obama administration will send two officials, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to address the AIPAC summit today. This comes just days after Rice called Netanyahu’s visit, quote, "destructive."

AMYGOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also facing domestic criticism for his unconventional Washington visit, which comes just two weeks before an election in which he seeks a third term in Israel. On Sunday, a group representing nearly 200 of Israel’s top retired military and intelligence officials accused Netanyahu of assaulting the U.S.-Israel alliance.

But despite talk of a U.S. and Israeli dispute, the Obama administration has taken pains to display its staunch support for the Israeli government. Speaking just today in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for what he called an "obsession" and "bias" against Israel. The council is expected to release a report in the coming weeks on potential war crimes in Israel’s U.S.-backed Gaza assault last summer.

For more, we spend the hour today with world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Noam Chomsky. He has written over a hundred books, most recently On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Ilan Pappé, is titled On Palestine and will be out next month. Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50 years.

Noam Chomsky, it’s great to have you back here at Democracy Now!, and particularly in our very snowy outside, but warm inside, New York studio.

NOAMCHOMSKY: Delighted to be here again.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Noam, let’s start with Netanyahu’s visit. He is set to make this unprecedented joint address to Congress, unprecedented because of the kind of rift it has demonstrated between the Republicans and the Democratic president, President Obama. Can you talk about its significance?

NOAMCHOMSKY: For both president—Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran. They have a common interest in ensuring that there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region. And it is—if we believe U.S. intelligence—don’t see any reason not to—their analysis is that if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which they don’t know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Now, their general strategic posture is one of deterrence. They have low military expenditures. According to U.S. intelligence, their strategic doctrine is to try to prevent an attack, up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don’t think anyone with a grey cell functioning thinks that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon, or even try to. The country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But they might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don’t want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and aggression in the region and don’t want any impediment to that.

And for the Republicans in Congress, there’s another interest—namely, to undermine anything that Obama, you know, the entity Christ, might try to do. So that’s a separate issue there. The Republicans stopped being an ordinary parliamentary party some years ago. They were described, I think accurately, by Norman Ornstein, the very respected conservative political analyst, American Enterprise Institute; he said the party has become a radical insurgency which has abandoned any commitment to parliamentary democracy. And their goal for the last years has simply been to undermine anything that Obama might do, in an effort to regain power and serve their primary constituency, which is the very wealthy and the corporate sector. They try to conceal this with all sorts of other means. In doing so, they’ve had to—you can’t get votes that way, so they’ve had to mobilize sectors of the population which have always been there but were never mobilized into an organized political force: evangelical Christians, extreme nationalists, terrified people who have to carry guns into Starbucks because somebody might be after them, and so on and so forth. That’s a big force. And inspiring fear is not very difficult in the United States. It’s a long history, back to colonial times, of—as an extremely frightened society, which is an interesting story in itself. And mobilizing people in fear of them, whoever "them" happens to be, is an effective technique used over and over again. And right now, the Republicans have—their nonpolicy has succeeded in putting them back in a position of at least congressional power. So, the attack on—this is a personal attack on Obama, and intended that way, is simply part of that general effort. But there is a common strategic concern underlying it, I think, and that is pretty much what U.S. intelligence analyzes: preventing any deterrent in the region to U.S. and Israeli actions.

AARON MATÉ: You say that nobody with a grey cell thinks that Iran would launch a strike, were it to have nuclear weapons, but yet Netanyahu repeatedly accuses Iran of planning a new genocide against the Jewish people. He said this most recently on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, saying that the ayatollahs are planning a new holocaust against us. And that’s an argument that’s taken seriously here.

NOAMCHOMSKY: It’s taken seriously by people who don’t stop to think for a minute. But again, Iran is under extremely close surveillance. U.S. satellite surveillance knows everything that’s going on in Iran. If Iran even began to load a missile—that is, to bring a missile near a weapon—the country would probably be wiped out. And whatever you think about the clerics, the Guardian Council and so on, there’s no indication that they’re suicidal.

AARON MATÉ: The premise of these talks—Iran gets to enrich uranium in return for lifting of U.S. sanctions—do you see that as a fair parameter? Does the U.S. have the right, to begin with, to be imposing sanctions on Iran?

NOAMCHOMSKY: No, it doesn’t. What are the right to impose sanctions? Iran should be imposing sanctions on us. I mean, it’s worth remembering—when you hear the White House spokesman talk about the international community, it wants Iran to do this and that, it’s important to remember that the phrase "international community" in U.S. discourse refers to the United States and anybody who may be happening to go along with it. That’s the international community. If the international community is the world, it’s quite a different story. So, two years ago, the Non-Aligned—former Non-Aligned Movement—it’s a large majority of the population of the world—had their regular conference in Iran in Tehran. And they, once again, vigorously supported Iran’s right to develop nuclear power as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s the international community. The United States and its allies are outliers, as is usually the case.

And as far as sanctions are concerned, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s now 60 years since—during the past 60 years, not a day has passed without the U.S. torturing the people of Iran. It began with overthrowing the parliamentary regime and installing a tyrant, the shah, supporting the shah through very serious human rights abuses and terror and violence. As soon as he was overthrown, almost instantly the United States turned to supporting Iraq’s attack against Iran, which was a brutal and violent attack. U.S. provided critical support for it, pretty much won the war for Iraq by entering directly at the end. After the war was over, the U.S. instantly supported the sanctions against Iran. And though this is kind of suppressed, it’s important. This is George H.W. Bush now. He was in love with Saddam Hussein. He authorized further aid to Saddam in opposition to the Treasury and others. He sent a presidential delegation—a congressional delegation to Iran. It was April 1990—1989, headed by Bob Dole, the congressional—

AMYGOODMAN: To Iraq? Sent to Iraq?

NOAMCHOMSKY: To Iraq. To Iraq, sorry, yeah—to offer his greetings to Saddam, his friend, to assure him that he should disregard critical comment that he hears in the American media: We have this free press thing here, and we can’t shut them up. But they said they would take off from Voice of America, take off critics of their friend Saddam. That was—he invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. This is right after the Iraq-Iran War, along with sanctions against Iran. And then it continues without a break up to the present.

There have been repeated opportunities for a settlement of whatever the issues are. And so, for example, in, I guess it was, 2010, an agreement was reached between Brazil, Turkey and Iran for Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium for storage elsewhere—Turkey—and in return, the West would provide the isotopes that Iran needs for its medical reactors. When that agreement was reached, it was bitterly condemned in the United States by the president, by Congress, by the media. Brazil was attacked for breaking ranks and so on. The Brazilian foreign minister was sufficiently annoyed so that he released a letter from Obama to Brazil proposing exactly that agreement, presumably on the assumption that Iran wouldn’t accept it. When they did accept it, they had to be attacked for daring to accept it.

And 2012, 2012, you know, there was to be a meeting in Finland, December, to take steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. This is an old request, pushed initially by Egypt and the other Arab states back in the early '90s. There's so much support for it that the U.S. formally agrees, but not in fact, and has repeatedly tried to undermine it. This is under the U.N. auspices, and the meeting was supposed to take place in December. Israel announced that they would not attend. The question on everyone’s mind is: How will Iran react? They said that they would attend unconditionally. A couple of days later, Obama canceled the meeting, claiming the situation is not right for it and so on. But that would be—even steps in that direction would be an important move towards eliminating whatever issue there might be. Of course, the stumbling block is that there is one major nuclear state: Israel. And if there’s a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, there would be inspections, and neither Israel nor the United States will tolerate that.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to ask you about major revelations that have been described as the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. Last week, Al Jazeera started publishing a series of spy cables from the world’s top intelligence agencies. In one cable, the Israeli spy agency Mossad contradicts Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb within a year. In a report to South African counterparts in October 2012, the Israeli Mossad concluded Iran is "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons." The assessment was sent just weeks after Netanyahu went before the U.N. General Assembly with a far different message. Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate what he called Iran’s alleged progress on a nuclear weapon.

PRIMEMINISTERBENJAMINNETANYAHU: This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages. By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before—before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2012. The Mossad assessment contradicting Netanyahu was sent just weeks after, but it was likely written earlier. It said Iran, quote, "does not appear to be ready," unquote, to enrich uranium to the highest levels needed for a nuclear weapon. A bomb would require 90 percent enrichment, but Mossad found Iran had only enriched to 20 percent. That number was later reduced under an interim nuclear deal the following year. The significance of this, Noam Chomsky, as Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares for this joint address before Congress to undermine a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal?

NOAMCHOMSKY: Well, the striking aspect of this is the chutzpah involved. I mean, Israel has had nuclear weapons for probably 50 years or 40 years. They have, estimates are, maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. And they are an aggressive state. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times. It’s carrying out an illegal occupation that carries out brutal attacks like Gaza last summer. And they have nuclear weapons. But the main story is that if—incidentally, the Mossad analysis corresponds to U.S. intelligence analysis. They don’t know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But I think the crucial fact is that even if they were, what would it mean? It would be just as U.S. intelligence analyzes it: It would be part of a deterrent strategy. They couldn’t use a nuclear weapon. They couldn’t even threaten to use it. Israel, on the other hand, can; has, in fact, threatened the use of nuclear weapons a number of times.

AMYGOODMAN: So why is Netanyahu doing this?

NOAMCHOMSKY: Because he doesn’t want to have a deterrent in the region. That’s simple enough. If you’re an aggressive, violent state, you want to be able to use force freely. You don’t want anything that might impede it.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you think this in any way has undercut the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Netanyahu-Obama conflict that, what, Susan Rice has called destructive?

NOAMCHOMSKY: There is undoubtedly a personal relationship which is hostile, but that’s happened before. Back in around 1990 under first President Bush, James Baker went as far as—the secretary of state—telling Israel, "We’re not going to talk to you anymore. If you want to contact me, here’s my phone number." And, in fact, the U.S. imposed mild sanctions on Israel, enough to compel the prime minister to resign and be replaced by someone else. But that didn’t change the relationship, which is based on deeper issues than personal antagonisms.

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Mon, 02 Mar 2015 00:00:00 -0500The New Arab Cold War: U.S. Policy Sows Conflict, Unrest Across the Middle East and North Africahttp://www.democracynow.org/2015/2/3/the_new_arab_cold_war_us
tag:democracynow.org,2015-02-03:en/story/284ae9 AARON MATÉ: From the crisis in Ukraine, we turn now to turmoil across North Africa and the Middle East. And like in Ukraine, American policy past and present has played a major role in sowing conflict and unrest.
Libya faces its worst crisis since the U.S.-backed ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country is run by two different governments, each with their own parliaments and armies. In between are several other militant groups, including a branch of the Islamic State that took credit for a deadly attack on a Tripoli hotel last week. The U.N. mission in Libya is trying to hold unity talks between the two main warring factions. The U.N. mission chief recently warned Libya faces &quot;total chaos&quot; if the talks fail.
BERNARDINO LEÓN: The general impression is that the country is very close to total chaos, and that if they miss this opportunity, it&#8217;s very difficult to imagine that there will be a situation in the country that will allow easily to start a new process.
AMY GOODMAN : In neighboring Egypt, at least 18 civilian protesters were killed late last month while marking the fourth anniversary of the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. It was the worst killing of protesters since General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi became president last June. Sisi&#8217;s regime has banned protests, continued a crackdown on political opponents. The U.S. renewed U.S. military aid last year after a brief pause following the 2013 coup. On Monday, an Egyptian court confirmed the mass death sentences of nearly 200 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the party of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.
The crackdown has extended to journalists. On Monday, Al Jazeera reporter Peter Greste spoke out from Cyprus after being released from prison and deported. Greste had spent 400 days behind bars with two Al Jazeera colleagues.
PETER GRESTE : Look, I can&#8217;t tell you how relieved I am at being free. I mean, I really didn&#8217;t expect it. We were settling in for a period of months behind prison and for the retrial. And so, to be out now, today, with just a few minutes&#8217; notice, really, is just, just extraordinary. But I also feel incredible angst about my colleagues, leaving them behind.
AMY GOODMAN : Peter Greste&#8217;s colleague, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy, appears close to release and deportation after renouncing his Egyptian citizenship. The fate of the third Al Jazeera prisoner, Baher Mohamed, is unclear, as he is an Egyptian citizen.
Meanwhile, Iraq is coming off its deadliest month in years. The United Nations says over 1,375 people were killed in January. In an interview last week, outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. might need to send noncombat troops to Iraq for the ongoing campaign against the Islamic State.
AARON MATÉ: In Syria, the world&#8217;s worst humanitarian crisis, the U.S. has backed off its calls for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. Despite training opposition fighters, U.S. actions in Syria now target the Islamic State, not the Assad government it once threatened to strike. As the U.S. wages its bombing campaign against ISIS , the militant group continues to kill foreign hostages, most recently two Japanese nationals.
In Syria&#8217;s neighbor, Lebanon, Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire last week in one of their most violent clashes since the 2006 war. The incident was followed days later by a Washington Post report that the CIA and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad, assassinated a senior Hezbollah leader seven years ago this month. The killing of Imad Mughniyah raises a number of legal issues, as well as the potential for reprisals from Hezbollah.
AMY GOODMAN : Seven years after that joint assassination, relations between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are reportedly at their lowest point to date. White House officials have criticized Netanyahu for a planned trip to the U.S. next month to address a joint session of Congress on Iran.
To the south, President Obama led a large delegation to Saudi Arabia last month following the death of King Abdullah. Obama&#8217;s trip was seen as a major display of U.S. support for the Saudi kingdom despite its poor record on human rights at home and abroad. In an interview on CNN , President Obama defended the U.S. partnership with Saudi Arabia and his decision not to raise human rights concerns during his trip.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability.
AMY GOODMAN : To the south of Saudi Arabia is Yemen, where uncertainty prevails following the resignation of President Abdu Hadi last month. Houthi rebels have controlled the capital Sana&#8217;a since launching an offensive in September. They have set a deadline of today to seize power unless the political crisis is resolved. The Houthis appear to have major backing from Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime U.S.-backed president ousted by the popular uprising in 2011. Amidst the crisis, the U.S. continues a drone war inside Yemen targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP , which has grown deadlier in recent years and took credit for the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.
Well, to discuss the state of the Middle East and the U.S. role in ongoing conflicts, we&#8217;re joined by Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, author of several books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and, most recently, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South . His new piece for The Hindu is called &quot;The Architects of West Asia&#8217;s Chaos.&quot;
Professor Vijay Prashad, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don&#8217;t we talk about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coming to not the White House, not invited by the White House, but by—represented by the opposition to the White House in Congress, the House speaker, John Boehner? He&#8217;s going to be addressing a joint session of Congress.
VIJAY PRASHAD : Well, I mean, this has been a drama for several years, the so-called Netanyahu-Obama clash. This is not the first time that Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided to snub U.S. President Obama. This is not the first time that the Republicans have invited him to speak in Congress against the wishes of the White House.
But I think there is a little too much being made of this particular event—and a little too little at the same time. It&#8217;s a little too much because I think there&#8217;s been, over the course of the last several months, a return to a sort of stable set of alliances that the United States has had for decades—in other words, lining up again with its major allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and now Saudi Arabia and American-backed Egypt. These pillars of stability have asserted themselves in the region. It&#8217;s no secret that Mr. Obama has put a lot in terms of, you know, working with the Saudis in the region. So, I think, in that sense, too much is made of the clash with Netanyahu. There is a stability of U.S. and Israeli interests, and they&#8217;re going forward together on the ground.
There&#8217;s too little made of this because, unfortunately, this kind of clash that Mr. Netanyahu is setting up is going to bring up the problem of solving the dispute with Iran. To my mind, there is no way forward in the Middle East unless there is some rapprochement with Iran, not only from the United States, but also Saudi Arabia. And so, Mr. Netanyahu&#8217;s high-stakes game of coming to the U.S. Congress is going to muddy the attempt to create some rapprochement for one of the major contradictions in West Asia.
AARON MATÉ: And going to Israel&#8217;s north, to Lebanon, can you talk about this violence that erupted last week—two Israeli soldiers, one Spanish peacekeeper were killed—and then, days later, this revelation that the U.S. and Israel collaborated on a 2008 assassination of a senior Hezbollah figure in Damascus, in Syria?
VIJAY PRASHAD : Well, Aaron, you know, the problem in Syria has been grave: over 200,000 people dead, much of Syria destroyed, no sign of a political solution, increased audacity by the Islamic State and by Jabhat al-Nusra and other al-Qaeda-backed groups inside Syria. In this context, over the past almost two years, Israel has repeatedly struck against Hezbollah targets inside Syria. You know, there was a strike late last year in Damascus airport over apparent—a load of rockets that were coming in to resupply Hezbollah, perhaps from Iran. Just a few weeks ago, in the Quneitra area up in the mountains in Syria, Israel struck a car, killing an Iranian general and a 20-year-old Hezbollah fighter by the name of Jihad Mughniyeh. When this attack happened, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech saying, you know, Hezbollah is going to respond now, finally, after so many provocations.
And so, what Hezbollah did was they didn&#8217;t attack across the blue line, which is the U.N.-mandated border between Israel and Lebanon, but they attacked in the Shebaa Farms, which is an area of Lebanon that Israel has occupied. In other words, it was a calculated attack inside the Shebaa region. Israel responded across the blue line, killing a Spanish peacekeeper. But within hours of the retaliation from Israel, Hezbollah contacted the U.N. peacekeepers and said that they are done with their attack on Israel, and now the status quo can come back. In other words, there have been provocations, but in a sense Hezbollah has been fairly disciplined in its retaliation. Nobody wants a war at this time between Hezbollah and Israel. It would complicate matters too greatly in the region. As it is, Jabhat al-Nusra is sitting at the borders of Lebanon, threatening to enter, threatening to create more chaos in that country. So nobody wants a war. Fortunately, this particular episode ended, you know, with—well, not peace, but the calm that was there before.
Of course, it wasn&#8217;t a very good thing that right after that what was revealed by The Washington Post and by Newsweek essentially validated what people in Hezbollah had known for a long time, which is that the father of the boy, the 20-year-old killed in Quneitra, Jihad Mughniyeh, his father, Imad Mughniyah, a major military chief of Hezbollah, had been killed in a massive car bomb in 2008 in Damascus, a bomb that was positioned by the Americans. It was triggered by the Israelis. This is not the first major car bomb that the Americans have used against Hezbollah. That was perhaps in 1985 in the attempted assassination of Hezbollah spiritual leader Mohammad Fadlallah. That was in Beirut in 1985. Fadlallah survived that attack, but 80 civilians died. So there has been a pattern of provocation. And fortunately, for now, this has not escalated into full-blown war.
AARON MATÉ: But the issues that this raises, the U.S. using a car bombing in a country where it&#8217;s not at war, in Syria, seven years ago, can you talk about the legal issues here? And also, do you see the potential for reprisals from Hezbollah?
VIJAY PRASHAD : Well, firstly, Aaron, as I said, this is not the first time that the United States has used a car bomb against Hezbollah when it has not been itself at war. In 1985, the bombing in Beirut was an enormous car bomb. It was placed by American intelligence and British intelligence. So there has been a pattern of utilizing this kind of assassination strategy against Hezbollah targets—not only Hezbollah targets, by the way, but also inside Iran against the nuclear—people associated with the nuclear program. There were a series of assassinations two years ago, you know, relatively unexplained.
This has, of course, got major legal ramifications. You know, the United States was not at war. The United States utilized Jordan, the kingdom of Jordan, to have the car bomb driven through. It associated with Israel in this strike. Of course, there is a different standard for the goose and a different standard for the gander. There has been no real international questioning of what has happened. There&#8217;s been no real outrage. I&#8217;m not surprised that at the Security Council this question wasn&#8217;t raised about using, you know, this kind of violence. Meanwhile, in 2005, you know, Mr. Hariri was killed inside Beirut, major politician in Lebanon, and there&#8217;s been a huge U.N. process of trying to uncover who killed Mr. Hariri. Here, CIA officials are directly saying that they conducted an assassination in Damascus, and there&#8217;s been absolutely no condemnation of it.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor Prashad, we only have two minutes, and we wanted to deal with President Obama&#8217;s trip to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, and Yemen and Libya. Start with Saudi Arabia, very quickly, and move on from there.
VIJAY PRASHAD : Well, you know, the United States has begun to put a lot of eggs into the Saudi basket, hoping that Saudi Arabia is going to have stabilized the situation vis-à-vis the Islamic State, stabilized the situation in North Africa. I personally think this is a very myopic approach. I think the approach should be to create rapprochement between the different parties to the various conflicts, to bring Saudi Arabia and Iran together. But on the other hand, I think the Obama administration is, you know, trying to play both sides against the middle—on the one side, giving Saudi Arabia complete carte blanche , and on the other side, I suppose, keeping the talks with Iran going at a very mute level.
Libya is a victim of this Arab Cold War, where the regional entities are utilizing Libya as a battleground for their own particular, you know, forward policy, whether it&#8217;s Saudi Arabia and Egypt, on one side, or Turkey and Qatar, on the other. I mean, the West is largely absent from Libya, having used that as a laboratory to prove that it can conduct a military strike and create a good outcome. In fact, the opposite is demonstrated. The West is entirely absent. And as you know, the American Embassy is no longer in Libya. The American Embassy to Libya is based in Malta. And there&#8217;s no emphasis from the West to try to once again bring parties together. It is a very dangerous situation, which is why the U.N. envoy has repeatedly said over the course of several months that we are near total chaos inside Libya. It&#8217;s a real scandal, and I wish there was more reporting, more care, about what&#8217;s happening to a country that was destroyed by a war prosecuted by NATO .
AMY GOODMAN : And finally, the U.S. drone strikes in Yemen?
VIJAY PRASHAD : Well, you know, it&#8217;s clear to people who observe Yemen that until the U.S. drone strikes, until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda had been largely vanquished in Yemen. And it was because of Abdullah Saleh, his own vendetta against the Zaidi people—
AMY GOODMAN : We have five seconds.
VIJAY PRASHAD : Well, to put it like this, the drone strikes don&#8217;t seem to be having the kind of impact that the government says they have. They seem to be having the opposite impact. It&#8217;s too bad that there&#8217;s been no reassessment of the strategy of assassinating people and meanwhile killing a very large number of civilians.
AMY GOODMAN : Vijay Prashad, we thank you for being with us, professor of international studies at Trinity College. AARON MATÉ: From the crisis in Ukraine, we turn now to turmoil across North Africa and the Middle East. And like in Ukraine, American policy past and present has played a major role in sowing conflict and unrest.

Libya faces its worst crisis since the U.S.-backed ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country is run by two different governments, each with their own parliaments and armies. In between are several other militant groups, including a branch of the Islamic State that took credit for a deadly attack on a Tripoli hotel last week. The U.N. mission in Libya is trying to hold unity talks between the two main warring factions. The U.N. mission chief recently warned Libya faces "total chaos" if the talks fail.

BERNARDINO LEÓN: The general impression is that the country is very close to total chaos, and that if they miss this opportunity, it’s very difficult to imagine that there will be a situation in the country that will allow easily to start a new process.

AMYGOODMAN: In neighboring Egypt, at least 18 civilian protesters were killed late last month while marking the fourth anniversary of the revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak. It was the worst killing of protesters since General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi became president last June. Sisi’s regime has banned protests, continued a crackdown on political opponents. The U.S. renewed U.S. military aid last year after a brief pause following the 2013 coup. On Monday, an Egyptian court confirmed the mass death sentences of nearly 200 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, the party of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

The crackdown has extended to journalists. On Monday, Al Jazeera reporter Peter Greste spoke out from Cyprus after being released from prison and deported. Greste had spent 400 days behind bars with two Al Jazeera colleagues.

PETERGRESTE: Look, I can’t tell you how relieved I am at being free. I mean, I really didn’t expect it. We were settling in for a period of months behind prison and for the retrial. And so, to be out now, today, with just a few minutes’ notice, really, is just, just extraordinary. But I also feel incredible angst about my colleagues, leaving them behind.

AMYGOODMAN: Peter Greste’s colleague, Egyptian-Canadian Mohamed Fahmy, appears close to release and deportation after renouncing his Egyptian citizenship. The fate of the third Al Jazeera prisoner, Baher Mohamed, is unclear, as he is an Egyptian citizen.

Meanwhile, Iraq is coming off its deadliest month in years. The United Nations says over 1,375 people were killed in January. In an interview last week, outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. might need to send noncombat troops to Iraq for the ongoing campaign against the Islamic State.

AARON MATÉ: In Syria, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the U.S. has backed off its calls for the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. Despite training opposition fighters, U.S. actions in Syria now target the Islamic State, not the Assad government it once threatened to strike. As the U.S. wages its bombing campaign against ISIS, the militant group continues to kill foreign hostages, most recently two Japanese nationals.

In Syria’s neighbor, Lebanon, Hezbollah and Israel exchanged fire last week in one of their most violent clashes since the 2006 war. The incident was followed days later by a Washington Post report that the CIA and its Israeli counterpart, the Mossad, assassinated a senior Hezbollah leader seven years ago this month. The killing of Imad Mughniyah raises a number of legal issues, as well as the potential for reprisals from Hezbollah.

AMYGOODMAN: Seven years after that joint assassination, relations between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are reportedly at their lowest point to date. White House officials have criticized Netanyahu for a planned trip to the U.S. next month to address a joint session of Congress on Iran.

To the south, President Obama led a large delegation to Saudi Arabia last month following the death of King Abdullah. Obama’s trip was seen as a major display of U.S. support for the Saudi kingdom despite its poor record on human rights at home and abroad. In an interview on CNN, President Obama defended the U.S. partnership with Saudi Arabia and his decision not to raise human rights concerns during his trip.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Sometimes we have to balance our need to speak to them about human rights issues with immediate concerns that we have in terms of countering terrorism or dealing with regional stability.

AMYGOODMAN: To the south of Saudi Arabia is Yemen, where uncertainty prevails following the resignation of President Abdu Hadi last month. Houthi rebels have controlled the capital Sana’a since launching an offensive in September. They have set a deadline of today to seize power unless the political crisis is resolved. The Houthis appear to have major backing from Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime U.S.-backed president ousted by the popular uprising in 2011. Amidst the crisis, the U.S. continues a drone war inside Yemen targeting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, AQAP, which has grown deadlier in recent years and took credit for the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris.

Well, to discuss the state of the Middle East and the U.S. role in ongoing conflicts, we’re joined by Vijay Prashad, a professor of international studies at Trinity College, author of several books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter and, most recently, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. His new piece for The Hindu is called "The Architects of West Asia’s Chaos."

Professor Vijay Prashad, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t we talk about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu coming to not the White House, not invited by the White House, but by—represented by the opposition to the White House in Congress, the House speaker, John Boehner? He’s going to be addressing a joint session of Congress.

VIJAYPRASHAD: Well, I mean, this has been a drama for several years, the so-called Netanyahu-Obama clash. This is not the first time that Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided to snub U.S. President Obama. This is not the first time that the Republicans have invited him to speak in Congress against the wishes of the White House.

But I think there is a little too much being made of this particular event—and a little too little at the same time. It’s a little too much because I think there’s been, over the course of the last several months, a return to a sort of stable set of alliances that the United States has had for decades—in other words, lining up again with its major allies, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and now Saudi Arabia and American-backed Egypt. These pillars of stability have asserted themselves in the region. It’s no secret that Mr. Obama has put a lot in terms of, you know, working with the Saudis in the region. So, I think, in that sense, too much is made of the clash with Netanyahu. There is a stability of U.S. and Israeli interests, and they’re going forward together on the ground.

There’s too little made of this because, unfortunately, this kind of clash that Mr. Netanyahu is setting up is going to bring up the problem of solving the dispute with Iran. To my mind, there is no way forward in the Middle East unless there is some rapprochement with Iran, not only from the United States, but also Saudi Arabia. And so, Mr. Netanyahu’s high-stakes game of coming to the U.S. Congress is going to muddy the attempt to create some rapprochement for one of the major contradictions in West Asia.

AARON MATÉ: And going to Israel’s north, to Lebanon, can you talk about this violence that erupted last week—two Israeli soldiers, one Spanish peacekeeper were killed—and then, days later, this revelation that the U.S. and Israel collaborated on a 2008 assassination of a senior Hezbollah figure in Damascus, in Syria?

VIJAYPRASHAD: Well, Aaron, you know, the problem in Syria has been grave: over 200,000 people dead, much of Syria destroyed, no sign of a political solution, increased audacity by the Islamic State and by Jabhat al-Nusra and other al-Qaeda-backed groups inside Syria. In this context, over the past almost two years, Israel has repeatedly struck against Hezbollah targets inside Syria. You know, there was a strike late last year in Damascus airport over apparent—a load of rockets that were coming in to resupply Hezbollah, perhaps from Iran. Just a few weeks ago, in the Quneitra area up in the mountains in Syria, Israel struck a car, killing an Iranian general and a 20-year-old Hezbollah fighter by the name of Jihad Mughniyeh. When this attack happened, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech saying, you know, Hezbollah is going to respond now, finally, after so many provocations.

And so, what Hezbollah did was they didn’t attack across the blue line, which is the U.N.-mandated border between Israel and Lebanon, but they attacked in the Shebaa Farms, which is an area of Lebanon that Israel has occupied. In other words, it was a calculated attack inside the Shebaa region. Israel responded across the blue line, killing a Spanish peacekeeper. But within hours of the retaliation from Israel, Hezbollah contacted the U.N. peacekeepers and said that they are done with their attack on Israel, and now the status quo can come back. In other words, there have been provocations, but in a sense Hezbollah has been fairly disciplined in its retaliation. Nobody wants a war at this time between Hezbollah and Israel. It would complicate matters too greatly in the region. As it is, Jabhat al-Nusra is sitting at the borders of Lebanon, threatening to enter, threatening to create more chaos in that country. So nobody wants a war. Fortunately, this particular episode ended, you know, with—well, not peace, but the calm that was there before.

Of course, it wasn’t a very good thing that right after that what was revealed by The Washington Post and by Newsweek essentially validated what people in Hezbollah had known for a long time, which is that the father of the boy, the 20-year-old killed in Quneitra, Jihad Mughniyeh, his father, Imad Mughniyah, a major military chief of Hezbollah, had been killed in a massive car bomb in 2008 in Damascus, a bomb that was positioned by the Americans. It was triggered by the Israelis. This is not the first major car bomb that the Americans have used against Hezbollah. That was perhaps in 1985 in the attempted assassination of Hezbollah spiritual leader Mohammad Fadlallah. That was in Beirut in 1985. Fadlallah survived that attack, but 80 civilians died. So there has been a pattern of provocation. And fortunately, for now, this has not escalated into full-blown war.

AARON MATÉ: But the issues that this raises, the U.S. using a car bombing in a country where it’s not at war, in Syria, seven years ago, can you talk about the legal issues here? And also, do you see the potential for reprisals from Hezbollah?

VIJAYPRASHAD: Well, firstly, Aaron, as I said, this is not the first time that the United States has used a car bomb against Hezbollah when it has not been itself at war. In 1985, the bombing in Beirut was an enormous car bomb. It was placed by American intelligence and British intelligence. So there has been a pattern of utilizing this kind of assassination strategy against Hezbollah targets—not only Hezbollah targets, by the way, but also inside Iran against the nuclear—people associated with the nuclear program. There were a series of assassinations two years ago, you know, relatively unexplained.

This has, of course, got major legal ramifications. You know, the United States was not at war. The United States utilized Jordan, the kingdom of Jordan, to have the car bomb driven through. It associated with Israel in this strike. Of course, there is a different standard for the goose and a different standard for the gander. There has been no real international questioning of what has happened. There’s been no real outrage. I’m not surprised that at the Security Council this question wasn’t raised about using, you know, this kind of violence. Meanwhile, in 2005, you know, Mr. Hariri was killed inside Beirut, major politician in Lebanon, and there’s been a huge U.N. process of trying to uncover who killed Mr. Hariri. Here, CIA officials are directly saying that they conducted an assassination in Damascus, and there’s been absolutely no condemnation of it.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor Prashad, we only have two minutes, and we wanted to deal with President Obama’s trip to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, and Yemen and Libya. Start with Saudi Arabia, very quickly, and move on from there.

VIJAYPRASHAD: Well, you know, the United States has begun to put a lot of eggs into the Saudi basket, hoping that Saudi Arabia is going to have stabilized the situation vis-à-vis the Islamic State, stabilized the situation in North Africa. I personally think this is a very myopic approach. I think the approach should be to create rapprochement between the different parties to the various conflicts, to bring Saudi Arabia and Iran together. But on the other hand, I think the Obama administration is, you know, trying to play both sides against the middle—on the one side, giving Saudi Arabia complete carte blanche, and on the other side, I suppose, keeping the talks with Iran going at a very mute level.

Libya is a victim of this Arab Cold War, where the regional entities are utilizing Libya as a battleground for their own particular, you know, forward policy, whether it’s Saudi Arabia and Egypt, on one side, or Turkey and Qatar, on the other. I mean, the West is largely absent from Libya, having used that as a laboratory to prove that it can conduct a military strike and create a good outcome. In fact, the opposite is demonstrated. The West is entirely absent. And as you know, the American Embassy is no longer in Libya. The American Embassy to Libya is based in Malta. And there’s no emphasis from the West to try to once again bring parties together. It is a very dangerous situation, which is why the U.N. envoy has repeatedly said over the course of several months that we are near total chaos inside Libya. It’s a real scandal, and I wish there was more reporting, more care, about what’s happening to a country that was destroyed by a war prosecuted by NATO.

AMYGOODMAN: And finally, the U.S. drone strikes in Yemen?

VIJAYPRASHAD: Well, you know, it’s clear to people who observe Yemen that until the U.S. drone strikes, until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, al-Qaeda had been largely vanquished in Yemen. And it was because of Abdullah Saleh, his own vendetta against the Zaidi people—

AMYGOODMAN: We have five seconds.

VIJAYPRASHAD: Well, to put it like this, the drone strikes don’t seem to be having the kind of impact that the government says they have. They seem to be having the opposite impact. It’s too bad that there’s been no reassessment of the strategy of assassinating people and meanwhile killing a very large number of civilians.

AMYGOODMAN: Vijay Prashad, we thank you for being with us, professor of international studies at Trinity College.

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Tue, 03 Feb 2015 00:00:00 -0500Remembering Saudi's King Abdullah: "He Was Not a Benevolent Dictator, He Was a Dictator"http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/23/remembering_saudis_king_abdullah_he_was
tag:democracynow.org,2015-01-23:en/story/2717f0 AMY GOODMAN : We turn now to Saudi Arabia.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, well, in Saudi Arabia, the funeral for the Saudi king, Abdullah, has begun. He died on Thursday at the age of 90. His brother Salman will now become king of the oil-rich monarchy. The White House announced Vice President Joe Biden would travel to Saudi Arabia to offer condolences. King Abdullah was one of the closest U.S. allies in the region. In a statement, President Obama praised him, saying, quote, &quot;As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions. One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : While President Obama described Abdullah as a force of stability in the Middle East, analysts, many, accused Abdullah of turning the uprising in Syria into a proxy war with Iran. In 2010, WikiLeaks published U.S. diplomatic cables which identified Saudi Arabia as the world&#8217;s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups. King Abdullah also sent tanks to help squash pro-democracy uprisings in neighboring Bahrain. Saudi Arabia recently came under criticism for its treatment of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes to be carried out at a rate of 50 per week for charges including insulting Islam. He runs a political blog—or did, until he was imprisoned.
For more on the future on King Abdullah and the future of Saudi Arabia, we&#8217;re joined via Democracy Now! video stream by Toby Jones, associate professor of history and director of Middle East studies at Rutgers University. He&#8217;s also the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia , previously the International Crisis Group&#8217;s political analyst of the Persian Gulf.
Toby Jones, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the death of King Abdullah.
TOBY JONES : Well, Abdullah&#8217;s death of course marks a transition. It&#8217;s getting a lot of attention. I think, as you pointed out in the lead up here, you know, his record is not quite as positive or rosy as a lot of people are reflecting upon this morning. He came to power formally in 2005, celebrated as a potential reformer, as somebody who would modernize and lead the kingdom forward. But it turns out he&#8217;s largely failed on every one of those measures. He has turned the clock back in terms of inciting sectarianism at home and supporting the forces of radicalism abroad. Or, if we want to read this in some slightly more benign way, he&#8217;s at least not cracked down on the domestic forces at home that have sought to incite things like sectarianism. He burned bridges with Iraq. He saw the Arab Spring, the uprising in Syria, as an opportunity to challenge both Iran and Assad&#8217;s power there, knowing full well what the possibilities of blowback and the rise of a kind of new regional terrorism might be. They supported instability in Yemen. They&#8217;ve crushed pro-democracy forces in Bahrain. Look, Abdullah is somebody who was well liked in the West. He might have been admired by a large section of Saudi society. But his record is one that&#8217;s consistent with his predecessors: It&#8217;s at odds with democracy, with human rights and with all of the things that we&#8217;re supposed to value.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And about that last point, Professor Jones, what is the state of human rights and democracy in the Saudi kingdom?
TOBY JONES : Well, it&#8217;s as bad as it&#8217;s ever been. You know, I mean, you mentioned Badawi, in the lead up here, being sentenced to a long prison term and, of course, now subject to flogging publicly, a thousand lashes. I mean, this might seem outlandish, but this is sort of common practice in Saudi Arabia. Its prisons are full of political prisoners—they have been for quite a long time—including Islamists, suspected terrorists, as well as liberals and others who champion the cause of reform and human rights. There&#8217;s been a steady string of arrests and detentions over the last few years. We pay attention now because of the crude, kind of terrible nature of what&#8217;s involved in public beheadings and this kind of Medieval punishment of lashing people for speaking their minds, but this has been going on in Saudi Arabia for quite a long time.
I mean, it&#8217;s worth remembering that in 2002, 2003, Abdullah, when he was crown prince—although not formally the king, was nevertheless still in a position of political primacy—became a darling of the reform lobby and kind of the—what we might call the moderate political wing of Saudi Arabia&#8217;s domestic political society. He was seen as a reformer. He was embraced by a broad cross-section of folks who believed that Saudi Arabia, following 9/11, following the decade of the 1990s in which there was a kind of brutal politics and crackdown on dissent, that he was going to be the person who spearheaded a period of liberal opening. And it turns out that he turned against all of his domestic allies. When he saw opportunities to crush and push back against those who might challenge Saudi political primacy, he did so. And he did so as crudely as any of his predecessors did. He was not a benevolent dictator. He was a dictator.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the man who will succeed him, King Salman? There is some information, or is it rumors, that he has dementia?
TOBY JONES : Well, I mean, look, a lot of people claim to have insight into the internal politics of the royal family. And I would caution against saying that we know too much. I mean, Salman is not a young man. I mean, he&#8217;s at least 79, if not older than that. So he&#8217;s been in a—you know, he&#8217;s been around for quite a long time. Who knows how long his reign will be? If he is suffering from health issues, you know, the royal family is not going to let us know too much about that. There has been speculation that he&#8217;s suffering from dementia. And it&#8217;s likely that his reign will be a short one and that there are powers behind the throne that will make sure that the interests of the royal family will be protected, much like Abdullah and his predecessor, Fahd. The family protects itself. There is an arrangement likely in place in which the king is the first amongst equals; nobody can act too radically or too out of step with the interests of the family more broadly.
So Salman&#8217;s reign will be probably very consistent and similar to that of Abdullah&#8217;s. He&#8217;ll be a figurehead. He will likely wield some kind of influence, as will those who are closest to him, as will his successor, the, like, current crown prince, who is probably about a decade younger, Muqrin. But the reality here—and I think one of the things we get caught up in is we get caught up in the politics of succession in Saudi Arabia, and will there be a changing of the guard that leads to some fundamental transformation. The odds are very low that that&#8217;s going to happen. The royal family&#8217;s interests are in protecting themselves first, their privilege second, and making sure that there are limited challenges to their authority. They&#8217;re very good at this, and they have been for over half a century.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the role of the Saudi family or the Saudi elite in the continuing financing of jihadists around the world?
TOBY JONES : Well, I mean, Saudi Arabia is of course a wellhead for a certain kind of ideological thinking and production. There&#8217;s a lot of talk about Wahhabism and the similarities between what is the official orthodoxy of the Islamic—of the Saudi state and groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS and others. And I think those ideological connections matter. There are certainly—there are certainly operators on the ground. There is support within Saudi mosques for precisely these kinds of networks. The Saudi state is in a much more difficult—and the royal family, a much more difficult—position. They view—I think we have to be careful here. I think they view the regional political landscape through the lens of kind of good, old-fashioned geopolitics. I mean, they see Iran as a rival. They see Assad as a pawn in all of that game. And they understand that they have a kind of limited playbook, that there are kind of natural alliances with which they can—which they can forge mutual interests and cooperation. And the Islamists happen to be among those. But I don&#8217;t think the royal family is necessarily an ideological actor in the same way that some of the preachers and clerics in Saudi Arabia are. But they reach out because they have to, to these networks. They&#8217;re dealt a certain hand, and they play the game in the way that they best can.
But this is a dangerous proposition—it was that way in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was that way in Iraq after 2003—where the Saudis forge alliances, or they at least allow those that are sort of on the margins of the government to fund and support networks that are also simultaneously dangerous to the regime itself. That&#8217;s why they&#8217;re building a big fence on their border with Iraq. On the one hand, they&#8217;d like to see ISIS do damage in Syria, but they don&#8217;t want to see it come home. But, look, over the long term, this is an unsustainable, untenable proposition. The Saudis are eventually going to have to deal. They&#8217;re going to have to reckon with the blowback from Syria and Iraq. They&#8217;d like to postpone it as long as possible, but it&#8217;s likely inevitable.
AMY GOODMAN : And the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States, Toby Jones?
TOBY JONES : Well, this is a long-standing and complicated one. It&#8217;s often framed, as Obama mentioned or as others will likely remark today, that it&#8217;s framed through the lens of security and stability. And that certainly matters from the perspective of both Saudi and American policymakers. If we peel back the layers of what this means, though, it&#8217;s not always clear. It&#8217;s not as though the Saudis have any power to really shape the region or defend their interests militarily. They&#8217;re largely dependent on the United States for security assurances. The U.S. has happily projected its military power into the Persian Gulf since at least the early 1970s, if not earlier than that.
I mean, I think what this really comes down to is that the Saudis are the world&#8217;s most important oil producer. They have been for quite a long time. For that reason, they&#8217;ve been in the American political orbit since at least the late 1930s. And the oil functions in important ways. It functions because it&#8217;s the American—Americans see it as important to the global economy, to our own domestic political economic health. And we see Saudi Arabia as an important player in that respect. But oil wealth also does a lot of other things. It gets recycled to the American economy, especially with the purchase of weapons. And these all become entangled with Saudi Arabia. Our relationship is not just about providing security for oil. It&#8217;s about maintaining a certain kind of strategic and economic relationship that profits both sides.
AMY GOODMAN : Toby Jones, we want to thank you for being with us, associate professor of history and director of Middle East studies at Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia .
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we&#8217;ll talk Ferguson. What about the Justice Department not bringing civil rights charges against the police officer who killed Mike Brown? And then we&#8217;ll talk about a Supreme Court decision you might not have learned about this week, a major decision on behalf of whistleblowers. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: We turn now to Saudi Arabia.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, well, in Saudi Arabia, the funeral for the Saudi king, Abdullah, has begun. He died on Thursday at the age of 90. His brother Salman will now become king of the oil-rich monarchy. The White House announced Vice President Joe Biden would travel to Saudi Arabia to offer condolences. King Abdullah was one of the closest U.S. allies in the region. In a statement, President Obama praised him, saying, quote, "As a leader, he was always candid and had the courage of his convictions. One of those convictions was his steadfast and passionate belief in the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship as a force for stability and security in the Middle East and beyond."

AMYGOODMAN: While President Obama described Abdullah as a force of stability in the Middle East, analysts, many, accused Abdullah of turning the uprising in Syria into a proxy war with Iran. In 2010, WikiLeaks published U.S. diplomatic cables which identified Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups. King Abdullah also sent tanks to help squash pro-democracy uprisings in neighboring Bahrain. Saudi Arabia recently came under criticism for its treatment of imprisoned blogger Raif Badawi, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes to be carried out at a rate of 50 per week for charges including insulting Islam. He runs a political blog—or did, until he was imprisoned.

For more on the future on King Abdullah and the future of Saudi Arabia, we’re joined via Democracy Now! video stream by Toby Jones, associate professor of history and director of Middle East studies at Rutgers University. He’s also the author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, previously the International Crisis Group’s political analyst of the Persian Gulf.

Toby Jones, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the death of King Abdullah.

TOBYJONES: Well, Abdullah’s death of course marks a transition. It’s getting a lot of attention. I think, as you pointed out in the lead up here, you know, his record is not quite as positive or rosy as a lot of people are reflecting upon this morning. He came to power formally in 2005, celebrated as a potential reformer, as somebody who would modernize and lead the kingdom forward. But it turns out he’s largely failed on every one of those measures. He has turned the clock back in terms of inciting sectarianism at home and supporting the forces of radicalism abroad. Or, if we want to read this in some slightly more benign way, he’s at least not cracked down on the domestic forces at home that have sought to incite things like sectarianism. He burned bridges with Iraq. He saw the Arab Spring, the uprising in Syria, as an opportunity to challenge both Iran and Assad’s power there, knowing full well what the possibilities of blowback and the rise of a kind of new regional terrorism might be. They supported instability in Yemen. They’ve crushed pro-democracy forces in Bahrain. Look, Abdullah is somebody who was well liked in the West. He might have been admired by a large section of Saudi society. But his record is one that’s consistent with his predecessors: It’s at odds with democracy, with human rights and with all of the things that we’re supposed to value.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And about that last point, Professor Jones, what is the state of human rights and democracy in the Saudi kingdom?

TOBYJONES: Well, it’s as bad as it’s ever been. You know, I mean, you mentioned Badawi, in the lead up here, being sentenced to a long prison term and, of course, now subject to flogging publicly, a thousand lashes. I mean, this might seem outlandish, but this is sort of common practice in Saudi Arabia. Its prisons are full of political prisoners—they have been for quite a long time—including Islamists, suspected terrorists, as well as liberals and others who champion the cause of reform and human rights. There’s been a steady string of arrests and detentions over the last few years. We pay attention now because of the crude, kind of terrible nature of what’s involved in public beheadings and this kind of Medieval punishment of lashing people for speaking their minds, but this has been going on in Saudi Arabia for quite a long time.

I mean, it’s worth remembering that in 2002, 2003, Abdullah, when he was crown prince—although not formally the king, was nevertheless still in a position of political primacy—became a darling of the reform lobby and kind of the—what we might call the moderate political wing of Saudi Arabia’s domestic political society. He was seen as a reformer. He was embraced by a broad cross-section of folks who believed that Saudi Arabia, following 9/11, following the decade of the 1990s in which there was a kind of brutal politics and crackdown on dissent, that he was going to be the person who spearheaded a period of liberal opening. And it turns out that he turned against all of his domestic allies. When he saw opportunities to crush and push back against those who might challenge Saudi political primacy, he did so. And he did so as crudely as any of his predecessors did. He was not a benevolent dictator. He was a dictator.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the man who will succeed him, King Salman? There is some information, or is it rumors, that he has dementia?

TOBYJONES: Well, I mean, look, a lot of people claim to have insight into the internal politics of the royal family. And I would caution against saying that we know too much. I mean, Salman is not a young man. I mean, he’s at least 79, if not older than that. So he’s been in a—you know, he’s been around for quite a long time. Who knows how long his reign will be? If he is suffering from health issues, you know, the royal family is not going to let us know too much about that. There has been speculation that he’s suffering from dementia. And it’s likely that his reign will be a short one and that there are powers behind the throne that will make sure that the interests of the royal family will be protected, much like Abdullah and his predecessor, Fahd. The family protects itself. There is an arrangement likely in place in which the king is the first amongst equals; nobody can act too radically or too out of step with the interests of the family more broadly.

So Salman’s reign will be probably very consistent and similar to that of Abdullah’s. He’ll be a figurehead. He will likely wield some kind of influence, as will those who are closest to him, as will his successor, the, like, current crown prince, who is probably about a decade younger, Muqrin. But the reality here—and I think one of the things we get caught up in is we get caught up in the politics of succession in Saudi Arabia, and will there be a changing of the guard that leads to some fundamental transformation. The odds are very low that that’s going to happen. The royal family’s interests are in protecting themselves first, their privilege second, and making sure that there are limited challenges to their authority. They’re very good at this, and they have been for over half a century.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the role of the Saudi family or the Saudi elite in the continuing financing of jihadists around the world?

TOBYJONES: Well, I mean, Saudi Arabia is of course a wellhead for a certain kind of ideological thinking and production. There’s a lot of talk about Wahhabism and the similarities between what is the official orthodoxy of the Islamic—of the Saudi state and groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS and others. And I think those ideological connections matter. There are certainly—there are certainly operators on the ground. There is support within Saudi mosques for precisely these kinds of networks. The Saudi state is in a much more difficult—and the royal family, a much more difficult—position. They view—I think we have to be careful here. I think they view the regional political landscape through the lens of kind of good, old-fashioned geopolitics. I mean, they see Iran as a rival. They see Assad as a pawn in all of that game. And they understand that they have a kind of limited playbook, that there are kind of natural alliances with which they can—which they can forge mutual interests and cooperation. And the Islamists happen to be among those. But I don’t think the royal family is necessarily an ideological actor in the same way that some of the preachers and clerics in Saudi Arabia are. But they reach out because they have to, to these networks. They’re dealt a certain hand, and they play the game in the way that they best can.

But this is a dangerous proposition—it was that way in Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was that way in Iraq after 2003—where the Saudis forge alliances, or they at least allow those that are sort of on the margins of the government to fund and support networks that are also simultaneously dangerous to the regime itself. That’s why they’re building a big fence on their border with Iraq. On the one hand, they’d like to see ISIS do damage in Syria, but they don’t want to see it come home. But, look, over the long term, this is an unsustainable, untenable proposition. The Saudis are eventually going to have to deal. They’re going to have to reckon with the blowback from Syria and Iraq. They’d like to postpone it as long as possible, but it’s likely inevitable.

AMYGOODMAN: And the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States, Toby Jones?

TOBYJONES: Well, this is a long-standing and complicated one. It’s often framed, as Obama mentioned or as others will likely remark today, that it’s framed through the lens of security and stability. And that certainly matters from the perspective of both Saudi and American policymakers. If we peel back the layers of what this means, though, it’s not always clear. It’s not as though the Saudis have any power to really shape the region or defend their interests militarily. They’re largely dependent on the United States for security assurances. The U.S. has happily projected its military power into the Persian Gulf since at least the early 1970s, if not earlier than that.

I mean, I think what this really comes down to is that the Saudis are the world’s most important oil producer. They have been for quite a long time. For that reason, they’ve been in the American political orbit since at least the late 1930s. And the oil functions in important ways. It functions because it’s the American—Americans see it as important to the global economy, to our own domestic political economic health. And we see Saudi Arabia as an important player in that respect. But oil wealth also does a lot of other things. It gets recycled to the American economy, especially with the purchase of weapons. And these all become entangled with Saudi Arabia. Our relationship is not just about providing security for oil. It’s about maintaining a certain kind of strategic and economic relationship that profits both sides.

AMYGOODMAN: Toby Jones, we want to thank you for being with us, associate professor of history and director of Middle East studies at Rutgers University, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’ll talk Ferguson. What about the Justice Department not bringing civil rights charges against the police officer who killed Mike Brown? And then we’ll talk about a Supreme Court decision you might not have learned about this week, a major decision on behalf of whistleblowers. Stay with us.

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Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 -0500"U.S. Militarism Brings Chaos": As Obama Plans a War on ISIS, a Call for a Middle East-Led Responsehttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/8/us_militarism_brings_chaos_as_obama
tag:democracynow.org,2014-09-08:en/story/fc7927 AMY GOODMAN : President Obama has begun to unveil his strategy for an offensive against the Islamic State that could last as long as three years and beyond the end of his administration. This comes as the United States has carried out more than 140 airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq in the past month. Over the weekend, American warplanes launched fresh strikes against militants near Haditha Dam, less than 150 miles northwest of the capital, Baghdad.
On Tuesday, Obama is set to meet with Congress to discuss the new strategy; on Wednesday, scheduled to give a major address to give more details to the American public. He first outlined the plan Sunday on Meet the Press . Obama says he has ruled out the redeployment of ground troops in Iraq but has left open the possibility of airstrikes in Syria, as well as economic and political measures.
At the NATO summit Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. will lead the offensive against the Islamic State with a so-called &quot;core coalition&quot; of 10 countries. The group includes Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Turkey—the only Muslim state. On Sunday, Arab League foreign ministers met in Cairo and announced they would cooperate with efforts to combat militants who have overrun parts of Iraq and Syria. Their resolution did not explicitly support the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State but suggested it would back the effort. This is Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby.
SECRETARY GENERAL NABIL ELARABY : [translated] This matter is neither political nor security-related only, but we will discuss it from all directions to block it and stop its sources. This requires cooperation between different ministers and preemptive meetings and researching the subject from all its angles. However, the combat still stands, and the confrontation. It is not a simple decision, the decision to confront these phenomena, as many states demand. Also, by working on blocking the sources of terrorism through fighting its ideology, seizing its funding, remedying reasons and circumstances that led to the outbreak of this extremist terrorist phenomenon.
AMY GOODMAN : All of this comes as a new report by a private British firm that monitors arms trafficking says military equipment provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia has fallen into the hands of Islamic State fighters. The firm examined rockets and small arms stamped &quot;Property of the U.S. government&quot; that appear to have been supplied to Shiite forces in Iraq during the U.S. occupation.
Well, for more, we&#8217;re going to Beirut, Lebanon, to Rami Khouri, the director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is also editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star . His latest piece , &quot;Avoid a Rerun of the War on Terror.&quot; He&#8217;s joining us by Democracy Now! video stream in Beirut.
Welcome to Democracy Now! , Rami Khouri. What President Obama has said so far this weekend about the strategy in dealing with the Islamic State, as well as the, well, more than a hundred strikes in Iraq, can you respond?
RAMI KHOURI : Well, it&#8217;s pretty impressive how he can go from no strategy to 60 miles an hour in like five days, but I think we have to basically understand that the United States feels it must do something. It&#8217;s not quite sure what is the best thing to do. And Obama is being cautious, understandably, because the United States has just come out of two rather catastrophic military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a third, I would call it, catastrophic adventure with drone assassinations all over the world, with absolutely no accountability, total impunity. And the cruel and hard irony is that in the last, say, 15 or 20 years of the United States using military action to try to strike al-Qaeda and the derivative groups that have come out of al-Qaeda, the irony is that this has been the single greatest promoter, mobilizer of new recruits for these kinds of militant Islamic terror groups. So, the more the U.S. leads military action, the greater becomes the expanse of recruits and the territory that is controlled by these groups. So it&#8217;s a real dilemma for the United States, and it&#8217;s something that has to be fundamentally led by people in the region, and that&#8217;s not happening very well. So, there&#8217;s no easy answer.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain how that recruiting works, Rami Khouri.
RAMI KHOURI : Well, if you go back to the beginning of this phase of the Salafist, Qaeda, jihadi-type movements—there&#8217;s many different names for them, [inaudible], but let&#8217;s call them, you know, militant Islamists, like al-Qaeda—they started basically to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the late &#39;70s, early &#8217;80s, and the U.S. helped them with money and training and things like that. And then, in the mid-&#39;80s and then into the &#39;90s, the group under bin Laden&#39;s leadership in Sudan and other places shifted to try to hit the United States. They thought the far enemy—the U.S., they called the &quot;far enemy&quot;—was the one that had to be hit, because it was the U.S. that was supporting all these dictators in the Arab world, and therefore better to hit the far enemy. And then, after the U.S. came into the Middle East in the Iraq War to liberate Kuwait, and then the U.S. stayed, troops in Saudi Arabia, then the United States became the main enemy because, again, like the Russians in Afghanistan, it was a foreign army in Arab or Islamic lands, and therefore it had to be driven out.
So, military action by foreign powers, whether they&#8217;re Americans or Russian, it doesn&#8217;t matter. Military action in Arab Islamic lands by foreign powers has been the most consistent and most effective recruiting tool to attract new recruits to these kinds of movements, like al-Qaeda, like Jabhat al-Nusra, like the Islamic State and others, others like them, because these guys project themselves and see themselves as fighting what they call the defensive jihad. They&#8217;re trying to protect and cleanse Islamic societies from the two great problems they feel it faces. One is corrupt, amoral, un-Islamic regimes, and the other is foreign military threats and attacks. So, again, the U.S. using military action is going to increase the problem in the long run.
And you can see the track record going back to the mid-&#39;80s, when Clinton was attacking bin Laden&#39;s bases in Africa and other places, Sudan. And over the last 15 or 20 years, the more that the U.S. has used military power to attack and degrade al-Qaeda, the bigger that al-Qaeda has become. And if you look at these movements that have been spawned by it or imitate it, they now have anchorage, small anchorage, but they have anchorage in Somalia, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, in Nigeria, in Mali, in Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, probably some other places, too.
Now, these groups, I should say, don&#8217;t have support in these societies. They don&#8217;t willingly attract millions and millions of supporters. They have been rejected by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims. And they can only operate where there&#8217;s chaos. And American militarism brings chaos in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in other places. So this is why I&#8217;m so concerned about a rerun of George W. Bush&#8217;s really unsuccessful and, I would say, quite criminal war on terror.
AMY GOODMAN : This is President Obama speaking Sunday on Meet the Press .
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : We&#8217;re not looking at sending in 100,000 American troops. We are going to be, as part of an international coalition, carrying out airstrikes in support of work on the ground by Iraqi troops, Kurdish troops. We are going to be helping to put together a plan for them so that they can start retaking territory that ISIL had taken over. What I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL , we are going to systematically degrade their capabilities, we&#8217;re going shrink the territory that they control, and ultimately we&#8217;re going to defeat them.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s President Obama on Sunday. Can you talk about the other states that are joining in, Rami Khouri, and particularly Arab countries, where they fit into this picture?
RAMI KHOURI : Well, the problem with the Arab countries is that most of them are responsible for the inadvertent but clear birth and expansion of these kind of Salafi, jihadi, extremist, militant Islamist groups. If you go back to the &#8217;70s and &#8217;80s, where these groups really started to take shape, the incubator for al-Qaeda and other groups like it were Saudi jails, Egyptian jails, Jordanian jails, Iraqi jails, Syrian jails, Tunisian jails. The jails of Arab regimes is where these movements were born. Young men became radicalized, then they got out of jail, and then they became jihadis. They went to Afghanistan. Bin Laden organized them. The CIA helped them. And then, off they go. It was the American military presence in the region that created the conditions, in fact, that allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian, to come in and start an al-Qaeda offshoot there, and then that expanded.
So the problem is that all these Arab countries are in the same dilemma that the U.S. is in, which is their autocracy, their mistreatment of their citizens, created this problem over the years, and American militarism, from the American perspective, is also part of the impetus that expands this problem. So, combining American militarism with Arab dictatorships is probably the stupidest recipe that anybody could possibly come up with to try to fight jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and Islamic State and others, because it was that combination of Arab autocracy and American militarism that actually nurtured and let these movements expand. There has to be a more intelligent, more realistic process that allows the people in the Middle East to roll back these threats. And these people need to be fought; I&#8217;m not saying you sit around and do nothing. You have to fight these people and eradicate them, because they&#8217;re really awful. And then, the people in the region are the ones who suffer more than anybody else.
AMY GOODMAN : Rami Khouri—
RAMI KHOURI : But the way—
AMY GOODMAN : Rami Khouri, one of the ways that has focused U.S. attention, of course, is the two—is the killing of the U.S. journalists, the beheading of the U.S. journalists. The Independent had a very interesting piece , &quot;Who Beheads More People: ISIS or the Government of Saudi Arabia?&quot; And they said that in the 21 months between James Foley&#8217;s capture in 2012 and his subsequent beheading by ISIS militants in August 2014, Saudi Arabia beheaded 113 people. It says this did &quot;not include any estimates for executions at the end of 2012. Most of these beheadings are carried out as public executions at the notorious &#39;Chop-Chop Square&#39; in Riyadh for crimes such as blasphemy, drug smuggling, sedition and sorcery&#8217;, although for certain crimes such as adultery, the authorities may order death by stoning.&quot; Rami Khouri?
RAMI KHOURI : Well, this is a very old, you know, 18th century Wahhabi brand of hardline Islamic justice, really severe, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims all over the world think is something that should have been left behind in the 18th century. There&#8217;s very few people, almost nobody around the world, except the Saudis and these Islamic State guys and Jakarta—the people in Jakarta have stopped doing it—that do this. So I wouldn&#8217;t focus particularly on that. I mean, there&#8217;s been many more people that have been killed by American drones who are innocent than people who have been killed by Saudis. And the Saudis have this justice system. It&#8217;s just that we may not like it. They probably don&#8217;t like people being put in the electric chair in Texas every couple of months. So, there&#8217;s a qualitative difference between what we&#8217;re talking about. We can certainly—I would certainly disagree with the way the Saudis chop people&#8217;s heads off as a form of justice and deterrence, because it doesn&#8217;t work, any more than electric chairs work in the United States or [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, there&#8217;s the journalists wearing the orange jumpsuits, reminiscent of Guantánamo.
RAMI KHOURI : There&#8217;s what? Oh, yes, of course. So, what the Islamic State guys are doing are kind of poking Obama in the ribs and saying, &quot;Look, you kill us, we kill you. You make us dress in orange jumpsuits, we&#8217;re going to do the same thing to your people.&quot; Of course, the innocent journalists should not be captured or killed, and they certainly shouldn&#8217;t be put in jails, as they are in Egypt, which is the great friend of the United States. So there&#8217;s many, many parallels between these things, but each one of them is different. It&#8217;s hard to really—we shouldn&#8217;t compare the United States with Saudi Arabia, with Islamic State stuff. They&#8217;re all very different. But there is a common thread that runs through them, which is that the use of military power and extreme acts of torture or assassinations almost always backfire. You cannot try to have an orderly, just, decent society while relying heavily on militarism and death as a form of deterrence.
So, but the problem before us all is: What do we do about this Islamic State? These guys are taking more territory. They&#8217;re enforcing their rule by force, by terrorizing people. And very few people are happily accepting them. They don&#8217;t—you know, ordinary people don&#8217;t have a choice. If the Islamic State comes in with their guns and chops people&#8217;s heads off or crucifies a couple of people, everybody else stays [inaudible]. And this should be a telltale sign that these groups only can operate in zones of chaos. And the United States and others, the British, have helped create these zones of chaos in the last 20 years in Afghanistan and in Iraq, most recently. So, there&#8217;s really a lot of shared responsibility for this terrible situation we&#8217;re in, but the bottom line is we need to figure out how to fight the two real problems, which Obama keeps repeating as his strategy, the two real problems of autocratic, nondemocratic, abusive, corrupt, pretty inefficient and mediocre Arab government systems, Arab regimes, across the board. And the other one is the repeated use of American, British, Israeli, other military power in the region to try to enforce an order that the West and the Israelis and others feel is suitable for them. Those two problems are two of the root causes of all of these issues that we&#8217;re seeing, and the Islamic State is simply a symptom of years and years of this, of these kinds of problems of bad governance.
AMY GOODMAN : Rami Khouri, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, also editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star . We&#8217;ll link to your latest piece , &quot;Avoid a Rerun of the War on Terror.&quot; This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back in a minute. AMYGOODMAN: President Obama has begun to unveil his strategy for an offensive against the Islamic State that could last as long as three years and beyond the end of his administration. This comes as the United States has carried out more than 140 airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq in the past month. Over the weekend, American warplanes launched fresh strikes against militants near Haditha Dam, less than 150 miles northwest of the capital, Baghdad.

On Tuesday, Obama is set to meet with Congress to discuss the new strategy; on Wednesday, scheduled to give a major address to give more details to the American public. He first outlined the plan Sunday on Meet the Press. Obama says he has ruled out the redeployment of ground troops in Iraq but has left open the possibility of airstrikes in Syria, as well as economic and political measures.

At the NATO summit Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. will lead the offensive against the Islamic State with a so-called "core coalition" of 10 countries. The group includes Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Turkey—the only Muslim state. On Sunday, Arab League foreign ministers met in Cairo and announced they would cooperate with efforts to combat militants who have overrun parts of Iraq and Syria. Their resolution did not explicitly support the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State but suggested it would back the effort. This is Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby.

SECRETARYGENERALNABILELARABY: [translated] This matter is neither political nor security-related only, but we will discuss it from all directions to block it and stop its sources. This requires cooperation between different ministers and preemptive meetings and researching the subject from all its angles. However, the combat still stands, and the confrontation. It is not a simple decision, the decision to confront these phenomena, as many states demand. Also, by working on blocking the sources of terrorism through fighting its ideology, seizing its funding, remedying reasons and circumstances that led to the outbreak of this extremist terrorist phenomenon.

AMYGOODMAN: All of this comes as a new report by a private British firm that monitors arms trafficking says military equipment provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia has fallen into the hands of Islamic State fighters. The firm examined rockets and small arms stamped "Property of the U.S. government" that appear to have been supplied to Shiite forces in Iraq during the U.S. occupation.

Well, for more, we’re going to Beirut, Lebanon, to Rami Khouri, the director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is also editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star. His latest piece, "Avoid a Rerun of the War on Terror." He’s joining us by Democracy Now! video stream in Beirut.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Rami Khouri. What President Obama has said so far this weekend about the strategy in dealing with the Islamic State, as well as the, well, more than a hundred strikes in Iraq, can you respond?

RAMIKHOURI: Well, it’s pretty impressive how he can go from no strategy to 60 miles an hour in like five days, but I think we have to basically understand that the United States feels it must do something. It’s not quite sure what is the best thing to do. And Obama is being cautious, understandably, because the United States has just come out of two rather catastrophic military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a third, I would call it, catastrophic adventure with drone assassinations all over the world, with absolutely no accountability, total impunity. And the cruel and hard irony is that in the last, say, 15 or 20 years of the United States using military action to try to strike al-Qaeda and the derivative groups that have come out of al-Qaeda, the irony is that this has been the single greatest promoter, mobilizer of new recruits for these kinds of militant Islamic terror groups. So, the more the U.S. leads military action, the greater becomes the expanse of recruits and the territory that is controlled by these groups. So it’s a real dilemma for the United States, and it’s something that has to be fundamentally led by people in the region, and that’s not happening very well. So, there’s no easy answer.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain how that recruiting works, Rami Khouri.

RAMIKHOURI: Well, if you go back to the beginning of this phase of the Salafist, Qaeda, jihadi-type movements—there’s many different names for them, [inaudible], but let’s call them, you know, militant Islamists, like al-Qaeda—they started basically to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the late '70s, early ’80s, and the U.S. helped them with money and training and things like that. And then, in the mid-'80s and then into the '90s, the group under bin Laden's leadership in Sudan and other places shifted to try to hit the United States. They thought the far enemy—the U.S., they called the "far enemy"—was the one that had to be hit, because it was the U.S. that was supporting all these dictators in the Arab world, and therefore better to hit the far enemy. And then, after the U.S. came into the Middle East in the Iraq War to liberate Kuwait, and then the U.S. stayed, troops in Saudi Arabia, then the United States became the main enemy because, again, like the Russians in Afghanistan, it was a foreign army in Arab or Islamic lands, and therefore it had to be driven out.

So, military action by foreign powers, whether they’re Americans or Russian, it doesn’t matter. Military action in Arab Islamic lands by foreign powers has been the most consistent and most effective recruiting tool to attract new recruits to these kinds of movements, like al-Qaeda, like Jabhat al-Nusra, like the Islamic State and others, others like them, because these guys project themselves and see themselves as fighting what they call the defensive jihad. They’re trying to protect and cleanse Islamic societies from the two great problems they feel it faces. One is corrupt, amoral, un-Islamic regimes, and the other is foreign military threats and attacks. So, again, the U.S. using military action is going to increase the problem in the long run.

And you can see the track record going back to the mid-'80s, when Clinton was attacking bin Laden's bases in Africa and other places, Sudan. And over the last 15 or 20 years, the more that the U.S. has used military power to attack and degrade al-Qaeda, the bigger that al-Qaeda has become. And if you look at these movements that have been spawned by it or imitate it, they now have anchorage, small anchorage, but they have anchorage in Somalia, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, in Nigeria, in Mali, in Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, probably some other places, too.

Now, these groups, I should say, don’t have support in these societies. They don’t willingly attract millions and millions of supporters. They have been rejected by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims. And they can only operate where there’s chaos. And American militarism brings chaos in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in other places. So this is why I’m so concerned about a rerun of George W. Bush’s really unsuccessful and, I would say, quite criminal war on terror.

AMYGOODMAN: This is President Obama speaking Sunday on Meet the Press.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: We’re not looking at sending in 100,000 American troops. We are going to be, as part of an international coalition, carrying out airstrikes in support of work on the ground by Iraqi troops, Kurdish troops. We are going to be helping to put together a plan for them so that they can start retaking territory that ISIL had taken over. What I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL, we are going to systematically degrade their capabilities, we’re going shrink the territory that they control, and ultimately we’re going to defeat them.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s President Obama on Sunday. Can you talk about the other states that are joining in, Rami Khouri, and particularly Arab countries, where they fit into this picture?

RAMIKHOURI: Well, the problem with the Arab countries is that most of them are responsible for the inadvertent but clear birth and expansion of these kind of Salafi, jihadi, extremist, militant Islamist groups. If you go back to the ’70s and ’80s, where these groups really started to take shape, the incubator for al-Qaeda and other groups like it were Saudi jails, Egyptian jails, Jordanian jails, Iraqi jails, Syrian jails, Tunisian jails. The jails of Arab regimes is where these movements were born. Young men became radicalized, then they got out of jail, and then they became jihadis. They went to Afghanistan. Bin Laden organized them. The CIA helped them. And then, off they go. It was the American military presence in the region that created the conditions, in fact, that allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian, to come in and start an al-Qaeda offshoot there, and then that expanded.

So the problem is that all these Arab countries are in the same dilemma that the U.S. is in, which is their autocracy, their mistreatment of their citizens, created this problem over the years, and American militarism, from the American perspective, is also part of the impetus that expands this problem. So, combining American militarism with Arab dictatorships is probably the stupidest recipe that anybody could possibly come up with to try to fight jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and Islamic State and others, because it was that combination of Arab autocracy and American militarism that actually nurtured and let these movements expand. There has to be a more intelligent, more realistic process that allows the people in the Middle East to roll back these threats. And these people need to be fought; I’m not saying you sit around and do nothing. You have to fight these people and eradicate them, because they’re really awful. And then, the people in the region are the ones who suffer more than anybody else.

AMYGOODMAN: Rami Khouri—

RAMIKHOURI: But the way—

AMYGOODMAN: Rami Khouri, one of the ways that has focused U.S. attention, of course, is the two—is the killing of the U.S. journalists, the beheading of the U.S. journalists. The Independent had a very interesting piece, "Who Beheads More People: ISIS or the Government of Saudi Arabia?" And they said that in the 21 months between James Foley’s capture in 2012 and his subsequent beheading by ISIS militants in August 2014, Saudi Arabia beheaded 113 people. It says this did "not include any estimates for executions at the end of 2012. Most of these beheadings are carried out as public executions at the notorious 'Chop-Chop Square' in Riyadh for crimes such as blasphemy, drug smuggling, sedition and sorcery’, although for certain crimes such as adultery, the authorities may order death by stoning." Rami Khouri?

RAMIKHOURI: Well, this is a very old, you know, 18th century Wahhabi brand of hardline Islamic justice, really severe, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims all over the world think is something that should have been left behind in the 18th century. There’s very few people, almost nobody around the world, except the Saudis and these Islamic State guys and Jakarta—the people in Jakarta have stopped doing it—that do this. So I wouldn’t focus particularly on that. I mean, there’s been many more people that have been killed by American drones who are innocent than people who have been killed by Saudis. And the Saudis have this justice system. It’s just that we may not like it. They probably don’t like people being put in the electric chair in Texas every couple of months. So, there’s a qualitative difference between what we’re talking about. We can certainly—I would certainly disagree with the way the Saudis chop people’s heads off as a form of justice and deterrence, because it doesn’t work, any more than electric chairs work in the United States or [inaudible]—

RAMIKHOURI: There’s what? Oh, yes, of course. So, what the Islamic State guys are doing are kind of poking Obama in the ribs and saying, "Look, you kill us, we kill you. You make us dress in orange jumpsuits, we’re going to do the same thing to your people." Of course, the innocent journalists should not be captured or killed, and they certainly shouldn’t be put in jails, as they are in Egypt, which is the great friend of the United States. So there’s many, many parallels between these things, but each one of them is different. It’s hard to really—we shouldn’t compare the United States with Saudi Arabia, with Islamic State stuff. They’re all very different. But there is a common thread that runs through them, which is that the use of military power and extreme acts of torture or assassinations almost always backfire. You cannot try to have an orderly, just, decent society while relying heavily on militarism and death as a form of deterrence.

So, but the problem before us all is: What do we do about this Islamic State? These guys are taking more territory. They’re enforcing their rule by force, by terrorizing people. And very few people are happily accepting them. They don’t—you know, ordinary people don’t have a choice. If the Islamic State comes in with their guns and chops people’s heads off or crucifies a couple of people, everybody else stays [inaudible]. And this should be a telltale sign that these groups only can operate in zones of chaos. And the United States and others, the British, have helped create these zones of chaos in the last 20 years in Afghanistan and in Iraq, most recently. So, there’s really a lot of shared responsibility for this terrible situation we’re in, but the bottom line is we need to figure out how to fight the two real problems, which Obama keeps repeating as his strategy, the two real problems of autocratic, nondemocratic, abusive, corrupt, pretty inefficient and mediocre Arab government systems, Arab regimes, across the board. And the other one is the repeated use of American, British, Israeli, other military power in the region to try to enforce an order that the West and the Israelis and others feel is suitable for them. Those two problems are two of the root causes of all of these issues that we’re seeing, and the Islamic State is simply a symptom of years and years of this, of these kinds of problems of bad governance.

AMYGOODMAN: Rami Khouri, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, also editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star. We’ll link to your latest piece, "Avoid a Rerun of the War on Terror." This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

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Mon, 08 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400Obama to Visit Saudi Arabia, Key Source of Funding for Growing Jihadi Militarism in Middle Easthttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/26/obama_to_visit_saudi_arabia_key
tag:democracynow.org,2014-03-26:en/story/9161ea NERMEEN SHAIKH : &quot;Al-Qaida, the Second Act. Why the Global &#39;War on Terror&#39; Went Wrong.&quot; That&#8217;s the name of the new five-part series published in the U.K.&#39;s Independent newspaper that examines the resurgence of jihadists across the Middle East. A key part of the series examines how Saudi Arabia has openly backed militant groups in Syria, Iraq and other countries. Many analysts say the conflict in Syria has grown into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia&#39;s history of backing jihadist groups goes back decades. Fifteen of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudi. The 9/11 Commission Report identified Saudi Arabia as the main source of al-Qaeda financing. And in 2010, WikiLeaks published U.S. diplomatic cables which identified Saudi Arabia as the world&#8217;s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups.
AMY GOODMAN : Despite this record, Saudi Arabia remains a close U.S. ally. President Obama is heading to Saudi Arabia this week to meet with King Abdullah. Saudi Arabia is the only Middle Eastern or Gulf nation on Obama&#8217;s overseas itinerary. Members of Congress and human rights organizations have also been calling on Obama to address the kingdom&#8217;s treatment of women, religious minorities and political activists.
To talk more about Obama&#8217;s visit to the oil-rich kingdom, we go to London to speak with Patrick Cockburn, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who wrote the five-part series on the resurgence of al-Qaeda. One of the pieces is called &quot;Is Saudi Arabia Regretting Its Support for Terrorism?&quot;
So, can you answer that question, Patrick Cockburn, and also talk about it in the context of President Obama meeting with King Abdullah?
PATRICK COCKBURN : The Saudis have got rather nervous at the moment that—having supported these jihadi groups, that are all either linked to al-Qaeda or have exactly the same ideology and method of action of al-Qaeda, so they&#8217;ve introduced some laws saying that—against Saudis fighting in Syria or elsewhere. But it&#8217;s probably too late for this to have any effect. The al-Qaeda-type organizations really control a massive area in northern and eastern Syria at the moment and northern and western Iraq. The largest number of volunteers fighting with these al-Qaeda-type groups are Saudi. Most of the money originally came from there. But these people now control their own oil wells. They probably are less reliant on Saudi money.
Will President Obama&#8217;s visit make much difference? It&#8217;s doubtful. I mean, it&#8217;s a rather extraordinary relationship, which doesn&#8217;t get much attention, between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Saudi Arabia is one of the few theocratic absolute monarchies on Earth, and therefore it was always absurd to be allied to Saudi Arabia in a bid to introduce secular democracy in Syria or Libya or anywhere else. So, probably, they will come out with comforting statements, and the Saudis will be saying to Obama, &quot;Well, look, we&#8217;re taking measures against the jihadis now, so let&#8217;s step up our attempts to overthrow Assad in Syria.&quot; But in practice, the groups that they&#8217;re supporting are closely linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, the main al-Qaeda group. So I don&#8217;t think things are going to change very much.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : I want to turn to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010. In a December 2009 memo, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton identified Saudi Arabia as the world&#8217;s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. She writes, quote, &quot;While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Due in part to intense focus by the [U.S. government] over the last several years, Saudi Arabia has begun to make important progress on this front and has responded to terrorist financing concerns raised by the United States through proactively investigating and detaining financial facilitators of concern. Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.&quot;
Patrick Cockburn, that was a U.S. diplomatic cable from 2009 released in 2010. Could you explain why you think the U.S. has been hesitant to act against Saudi Arabia in the way that it has against other countries in the Arab world following 9/11, and especially following these revelations?
PATRICK COCKBURN : It&#8217;s pretty extraordinary, given that so much of what happened on 9/11 can be traced back to Saudi Arabia. Why hasn&#8217;t there been a greater reaction in the U.S. and the rest of the world? Well, the Saudis have cultivated people in Washington, government in Washington. There are enormous arms sales by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia. The arms on orders—on order at the moment are worth a total of $86 billion—fighter aircraft, helicopters, everything else. And they&#8217;ve also spent money cultivating former diplomats, officials, academics and so forth. And therefore, there hasn&#8217;t been—though I find this rather amazing—more pressure on Saudi Arabia or on the U.S. government to stop Saudi Arabia supporting jihadi movements. It&#8217;s not just money. It&#8217;s, I mean, a lot of it, propaganda of a satellite television, which is anti-Shia, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, hate propaganda. So long as they have these methods of propaganda, they can probably raise men and money to send to Syria and Iraq and elsewhere.
AMY GOODMAN : Patrick, this trip that President Obama—accompanied by Secretary of State John Kerry, to show the significance of it—in the United States is being seen as a reconciliation trip, the U.S. wanting to improve its relationship with Saudi Arabia, especially frayed when Saudi Arabia wanted the U.S. to be tougher on Iran—interestingly, Saudi Arabia sharing the same view as Israel on this issue. Can you talk about that in the context of the role Saudi Arabia is playing in the world?
PATRICK COCKBURN : Yes, I mean, last year, there was difference between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. over the support of al-Qaeda-type organizations in Syria, which in turn are destabilizing Iraq. Saudi Arabia was eager for Obama to launch a military assault on Syria last August after the use of poison gas in Damascus. They were vocally upset when the U.S. didn&#8217;t do this. They have pushed for a U.S. war with Iran, going back several years. King Abdullah is quoted by—on a diplomatic cable as saying, &quot;Cut off the head of the snake.&quot; So they&#8217;ll try to ensure that they&#8217;re at one with the U.S. in trying to bring down Assad and opposing Iran.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Patrick Cockburn, you&#8217;ve also pointed out that these Islamist groups, violent Islamist groups, have proliferated since 9/11, and especially after the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Could you explain what the distinction is, if any, between al-Qaeda and all of these offshoot groups, and if the hesitation on the part of the U.S. has to do with the fact that these new groups operate regionally rather than in the West?
PATRICK COCKBURN : Yes, I think that they draw too great a distinction—I mean, Washington draws too great a distinction between people who have a direct operational link to the remains of Osama bin Laden&#8217;s al-Qaeda in Pakistan and other groups that have the same ideology, operate in the same way, have the same methods. And you could see that in Libya, when—where the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was killed by jihadis, who were not, in fact, al-Qaeda, and he seems to have thought, and the people around him thought, were not as dangerous as al-Qaeda. And tragically, he and they were proved wrong. You can see that in Syria at the moment, that the largest group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is not in fact part of al-Qaeda—it used to be. There&#8217;s a new group, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official representative, but there isn&#8217;t much difference between these groups. They&#8217;re all pretty well the same. They are extraordinarily bigoted. They&#8217;re extraordinarily brutal. They kill Shia or any other nonfundamentalist Muslims who fall into their hands. So, pretending that one group, simply because it&#8217;s funded by Saudi Arabia, is not the equivalent of al-Qaeda, I think, is self-deception—and self-deception which may well have disastrous results, you know, as happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which eventually produced the Taliban and Osama bin Laden&#8217;s al-Qaeda.
AMY GOODMAN : In 2011, Democracy Now! spoke to former Senator Bob Graham and asked him about how part of the 9/11 Commission Report remains redacted.
BOB GRAHAM : The suppressed pages were in the Congressional Joint Inquiry. We worked diligently throughout 2002 to gather as much of the information as we could and to make recommendations. We had an 800-plus-page report, one chapter of which, which related primarily to the role of the Saudis in 9/11, was totally censored. Every word of that chapter has been denied to the American people.
AMY GOODMAN : What about that, Patrick Cockburn? You know, Bandar Bush, of course, as he was called, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, sitting out on the Truman Balcony with President Bush the day after the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. And then Bandar Bush, the former U.S.—Saudi ambassador to the U.S., being one of the major forces behind the forces, the rebel forces in Syria?
PATRICK COCKBURN : Yes, it&#8217;s sort of—it&#8217;s amazing. And, I mean, it&#8217;s had a very unfortunate consequence by not going after the very obvious roots of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, in terms of money and political support and so forth. This has enabled al-Qaeda to grow again. I mean, al-Qaeda, I worked out on the map, now controls an area in northern Syria and northern Iraq which is about the size of Great Britain. Al-Qaeda was rather a small organization at the time of 9/11. Since then, we&#8217;ve had the war on terror. We&#8217;ve had vast resources poured into this, increase in intelligence and security services, rendition, torture, everything else. And at the end of it, al-Qaeda and its affiliates are far larger than they were in—at the time of 9/11. I mean, this is a pretty extraordinary situation.
AMY GOODMAN : Of course, I just want to clarify, Bandar Bush was the nickname for him. His name was Prince Bandar bin Sultan. He&#8217;s now Saudi Arabia&#8217;s intelligence minister. Nermeen?
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Patrick Cockburn, that&#8217;s right, he&#8217;s the intelligence minister now, but as you point out in one of your articles, he&#8217;s no longer in charge of Saudi Arabia&#8217;s policy in Syria. Could you explain what you think the impact of that decision will be, and whether Saudi policy with respect to the rebels is actually changing?
PATRICK COCKBURN : I mean, it&#8217;s a very good question, and I think we&#8217;re going to maybe see the answer over the next week. Maybe one of the things it will be interesting to see, what comes out of Obama&#8217;s visit. Bandar bin Sultan&#8217;s policy in Syria failed somewhat disastrously. He wanted to get rid of Assad; they failed to do that. Instead, we&#8217;ve had these jihadi, al-Qaeda-type organizations grow enormously. And they now, sort of really the whole way from Baghdad to the Mediterranean, they control much of the territory. Now, the Saudis are—seem to be taking a slightly more diplomatic line, but what they&#8217;re saying is: &quot;We shall support jihadis, who are different from al-Qaeda but will still be able to overthrow Assad. We&#8217;ll do this from Jordan.&quot; But will this really happen? And if they do fund a anti-Assad army there, would it just be a mercenary army that has no real support within Syria?
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to move onto a segment next on Iraq. And earlier this month, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of openly funding the Sunni Muslim insurgents in western Anbar province. He told France 24, quote, &quot;I accuse them of inciting and encouraging the terrorist movements. I accuse them of supporting them politically and in the media, of supporting them with money and by buying weapons for them.&quot; If you could, finally, comment on that, as well as your final comment in your recent piece , saying, &quot;All the ingredients for a repeat of 9/11 are slipping into place, the difference today being that al-Qa&#8217;ida-type organisations are now far more powerful.&quot;
PATRICK COCKBURN : Yeah, the Iraqis have felt for a long time, but didn&#8217;t say so openly, that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Gulf monarchies were an essential prop to al-Qaeda in Iraq through private donations, through hate preachers, anti-Shia preachers, and finally they&#8217;ve come out and said it. And they have a lot of evidence also from suicide bombers who were captured before they blew themselves up.
On the other question, yes, definitely. I mean, you know, these drone attacks in Yemen and Waziristan, these declarations of victory, I think, just divert attention from the fact that you look at the map, that al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-type groups, that are no different from those that followed Osama bin Laden, now control a large territory. They have large revenues from oil wells. They have lots of experienced people. At the moment, they&#8217;re fighting against Assad and the Iraqi government. But they don&#8217;t Ike the governments of the West anymore. They&#8217;re not ideologically committed to only one enemy in their home countries. So if they do want to start making attacks in the West again along the lines of 9/11, they&#8217;re far better equipped militarily and politically, financially and any other way than they were when the attacks of 9/11 were originally made.
AMY GOODMAN : Patrick Cockburn, we want to thank you for being with us, Middle East correspondent for The Independent , just concluded a five-part series on the resurgence of al-Qaeda, including that piece , &quot;Is Saudi Arabia Regretting Its Support for Terrorism?&quot; President Obama is visiting Saudi Arabia on Friday along with Secretary of State John Kerry.
When we come back, two women, a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi feminist, join together for the right to heal on this 11th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Stay with us. NERMEENSHAIKH: "Al-Qaida, the Second Act. Why the Global 'War on Terror' Went Wrong." That’s the name of the new five-part series published in the U.K.'s Independent newspaper that examines the resurgence of jihadists across the Middle East. A key part of the series examines how Saudi Arabia has openly backed militant groups in Syria, Iraq and other countries. Many analysts say the conflict in Syria has grown into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia's history of backing jihadist groups goes back decades. Fifteen of the 19 September 11th hijackers were Saudi. The 9/11 Commission Report identified Saudi Arabia as the main source of al-Qaeda financing. And in 2010, WikiLeaks published U.S. diplomatic cables which identified Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups.

AMYGOODMAN: Despite this record, Saudi Arabia remains a close U.S. ally. President Obama is heading to Saudi Arabia this week to meet with King Abdullah. Saudi Arabia is the only Middle Eastern or Gulf nation on Obama’s overseas itinerary. Members of Congress and human rights organizations have also been calling on Obama to address the kingdom’s treatment of women, religious minorities and political activists.

To talk more about Obama’s visit to the oil-rich kingdom, we go to London to speak with Patrick Cockburn, the Middle East correspondent for The Independent who wrote the five-part series on the resurgence of al-Qaeda. One of the pieces is called "Is Saudi Arabia Regretting Its Support for Terrorism?"

So, can you answer that question, Patrick Cockburn, and also talk about it in the context of President Obama meeting with King Abdullah?

PATRICKCOCKBURN: The Saudis have got rather nervous at the moment that—having supported these jihadi groups, that are all either linked to al-Qaeda or have exactly the same ideology and method of action of al-Qaeda, so they’ve introduced some laws saying that—against Saudis fighting in Syria or elsewhere. But it’s probably too late for this to have any effect. The al-Qaeda-type organizations really control a massive area in northern and eastern Syria at the moment and northern and western Iraq. The largest number of volunteers fighting with these al-Qaeda-type groups are Saudi. Most of the money originally came from there. But these people now control their own oil wells. They probably are less reliant on Saudi money.

Will President Obama’s visit make much difference? It’s doubtful. I mean, it’s a rather extraordinary relationship, which doesn’t get much attention, between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Saudi Arabia is one of the few theocratic absolute monarchies on Earth, and therefore it was always absurd to be allied to Saudi Arabia in a bid to introduce secular democracy in Syria or Libya or anywhere else. So, probably, they will come out with comforting statements, and the Saudis will be saying to Obama, "Well, look, we’re taking measures against the jihadis now, so let’s step up our attempts to overthrow Assad in Syria." But in practice, the groups that they’re supporting are closely linked to Jabhat al-Nusra, the main al-Qaeda group. So I don’t think things are going to change very much.

NERMEENSHAIKH: I want to turn to U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010. In a December 2009 memo, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton identified Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest source of funds for Islamist militant groups such as the Afghan Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba. She writes, quote, "While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority. Due in part to intense focus by the [U.S. government] over the last several years, Saudi Arabia has begun to make important progress on this front and has responded to terrorist financing concerns raised by the United States through proactively investigating and detaining financial facilitators of concern. Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide."

Patrick Cockburn, that was a U.S. diplomatic cable from 2009 released in 2010. Could you explain why you think the U.S. has been hesitant to act against Saudi Arabia in the way that it has against other countries in the Arab world following 9/11, and especially following these revelations?

PATRICKCOCKBURN: It’s pretty extraordinary, given that so much of what happened on 9/11 can be traced back to Saudi Arabia. Why hasn’t there been a greater reaction in the U.S. and the rest of the world? Well, the Saudis have cultivated people in Washington, government in Washington. There are enormous arms sales by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia. The arms on orders—on order at the moment are worth a total of $86 billion—fighter aircraft, helicopters, everything else. And they’ve also spent money cultivating former diplomats, officials, academics and so forth. And therefore, there hasn’t been—though I find this rather amazing—more pressure on Saudi Arabia or on the U.S. government to stop Saudi Arabia supporting jihadi movements. It’s not just money. It’s, I mean, a lot of it, propaganda of a satellite television, which is anti-Shia, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, hate propaganda. So long as they have these methods of propaganda, they can probably raise men and money to send to Syria and Iraq and elsewhere.

AMYGOODMAN: Patrick, this trip that President Obama—accompanied by Secretary of State John Kerry, to show the significance of it—in the United States is being seen as a reconciliation trip, the U.S. wanting to improve its relationship with Saudi Arabia, especially frayed when Saudi Arabia wanted the U.S. to be tougher on Iran—interestingly, Saudi Arabia sharing the same view as Israel on this issue. Can you talk about that in the context of the role Saudi Arabia is playing in the world?

PATRICKCOCKBURN: Yes, I mean, last year, there was difference between Saudi Arabia and the U.S. over the support of al-Qaeda-type organizations in Syria, which in turn are destabilizing Iraq. Saudi Arabia was eager for Obama to launch a military assault on Syria last August after the use of poison gas in Damascus. They were vocally upset when the U.S. didn’t do this. They have pushed for a U.S. war with Iran, going back several years. King Abdullah is quoted by—on a diplomatic cable as saying, "Cut off the head of the snake." So they’ll try to ensure that they’re at one with the U.S. in trying to bring down Assad and opposing Iran.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Patrick Cockburn, you’ve also pointed out that these Islamist groups, violent Islamist groups, have proliferated since 9/11, and especially after the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Could you explain what the distinction is, if any, between al-Qaeda and all of these offshoot groups, and if the hesitation on the part of the U.S. has to do with the fact that these new groups operate regionally rather than in the West?

PATRICKCOCKBURN: Yes, I think that they draw too great a distinction—I mean, Washington draws too great a distinction between people who have a direct operational link to the remains of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in Pakistan and other groups that have the same ideology, operate in the same way, have the same methods. And you could see that in Libya, when—where the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens, was killed by jihadis, who were not, in fact, al-Qaeda, and he seems to have thought, and the people around him thought, were not as dangerous as al-Qaeda. And tragically, he and they were proved wrong. You can see that in Syria at the moment, that the largest group, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, is not in fact part of al-Qaeda—it used to be. There’s a new group, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official representative, but there isn’t much difference between these groups. They’re all pretty well the same. They are extraordinarily bigoted. They’re extraordinarily brutal. They kill Shia or any other nonfundamentalist Muslims who fall into their hands. So, pretending that one group, simply because it’s funded by Saudi Arabia, is not the equivalent of al-Qaeda, I think, is self-deception—and self-deception which may well have disastrous results, you know, as happened in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which eventually produced the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

AMYGOODMAN: In 2011, Democracy Now! spoke to former Senator Bob Graham and asked him about how part of the 9/11 Commission Report remains redacted.

BOBGRAHAM: The suppressed pages were in the Congressional Joint Inquiry. We worked diligently throughout 2002 to gather as much of the information as we could and to make recommendations. We had an 800-plus-page report, one chapter of which, which related primarily to the role of the Saudis in 9/11, was totally censored. Every word of that chapter has been denied to the American people.

AMYGOODMAN: What about that, Patrick Cockburn? You know, Bandar Bush, of course, as he was called, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, sitting out on the Truman Balcony with President Bush the day after the 9/11 attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. And then Bandar Bush, the former U.S.—Saudi ambassador to the U.S., being one of the major forces behind the forces, the rebel forces in Syria?

PATRICKCOCKBURN: Yes, it’s sort of—it’s amazing. And, I mean, it’s had a very unfortunate consequence by not going after the very obvious roots of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, in terms of money and political support and so forth. This has enabled al-Qaeda to grow again. I mean, al-Qaeda, I worked out on the map, now controls an area in northern Syria and northern Iraq which is about the size of Great Britain. Al-Qaeda was rather a small organization at the time of 9/11. Since then, we’ve had the war on terror. We’ve had vast resources poured into this, increase in intelligence and security services, rendition, torture, everything else. And at the end of it, al-Qaeda and its affiliates are far larger than they were in—at the time of 9/11. I mean, this is a pretty extraordinary situation.

AMYGOODMAN: Of course, I just want to clarify, Bandar Bush was the nickname for him. His name was Prince Bandar bin Sultan. He’s now Saudi Arabia’s intelligence minister. Nermeen?

NERMEENSHAIKH: Patrick Cockburn, that’s right, he’s the intelligence minister now, but as you point out in one of your articles, he’s no longer in charge of Saudi Arabia’s policy in Syria. Could you explain what you think the impact of that decision will be, and whether Saudi policy with respect to the rebels is actually changing?

PATRICKCOCKBURN: I mean, it’s a very good question, and I think we’re going to maybe see the answer over the next week. Maybe one of the things it will be interesting to see, what comes out of Obama’s visit. Bandar bin Sultan’s policy in Syria failed somewhat disastrously. He wanted to get rid of Assad; they failed to do that. Instead, we’ve had these jihadi, al-Qaeda-type organizations grow enormously. And they now, sort of really the whole way from Baghdad to the Mediterranean, they control much of the territory. Now, the Saudis are—seem to be taking a slightly more diplomatic line, but what they’re saying is: "We shall support jihadis, who are different from al-Qaeda but will still be able to overthrow Assad. We’ll do this from Jordan." But will this really happen? And if they do fund a anti-Assad army there, would it just be a mercenary army that has no real support within Syria?

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to move onto a segment next on Iraq. And earlier this month, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of openly funding the Sunni Muslim insurgents in western Anbar province. He told France 24, quote, "I accuse them of inciting and encouraging the terrorist movements. I accuse them of supporting them politically and in the media, of supporting them with money and by buying weapons for them." If you could, finally, comment on that, as well as your final comment in your recent piece, saying, "All the ingredients for a repeat of 9/11 are slipping into place, the difference today being that al-Qa’ida-type organisations are now far more powerful."

PATRICKCOCKBURN: Yeah, the Iraqis have felt for a long time, but didn’t say so openly, that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Gulf monarchies were an essential prop to al-Qaeda in Iraq through private donations, through hate preachers, anti-Shia preachers, and finally they’ve come out and said it. And they have a lot of evidence also from suicide bombers who were captured before they blew themselves up.

On the other question, yes, definitely. I mean, you know, these drone attacks in Yemen and Waziristan, these declarations of victory, I think, just divert attention from the fact that you look at the map, that al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-type groups, that are no different from those that followed Osama bin Laden, now control a large territory. They have large revenues from oil wells. They have lots of experienced people. At the moment, they’re fighting against Assad and the Iraqi government. But they don’t Ike the governments of the West anymore. They’re not ideologically committed to only one enemy in their home countries. So if they do want to start making attacks in the West again along the lines of 9/11, they’re far better equipped militarily and politically, financially and any other way than they were when the attacks of 9/11 were originally made.

AMYGOODMAN: Patrick Cockburn, we want to thank you for being with us, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, just concluded a five-part series on the resurgence of al-Qaeda, including that piece, "Is Saudi Arabia Regretting Its Support for Terrorism?" President Obama is visiting Saudi Arabia on Friday along with Secretary of State John Kerry.

When we come back, two women, a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi feminist, join together for the right to heal on this 11th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Stay with us.

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Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0400Exclusive: As Obama and Romney Agree on Afghan War, Israel and Syria, Third Parties Give Alternativehttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/23/exclusive_as_obama_and_romney_agree
tag:democracynow.org,2012-10-23:en/story/3467ab AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the road in our 100-city tour in San Rafael, California.
President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney squared off Monday night in Boca Raton, Florida, in their final presidential debate before the November 6 general election. In a debate focused on foreign policy, both candidates agreed on a number of issues, including the secret drone war, U.S. support for Israel, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and their opposition to U.S. military involvement in Syria. But they clashed over military spending, Iran and Libya. Several key international issues were not addressed at all, including climate change, the economic crisis in Europe, and the U.S.-backed drug war in Latin America.
Last night, Democracy Now! broke the sound barrier once again by adding the voices of two third-party presidential candidates that were excluded from the debate: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. We aired the Obama-Romney debate, pausing the tape after each question to give Dr. Stein and Rocky Anderson a chance to respond to the same questions put to the major-party candidates. We also invited Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, but he declined to join us. We recorded the show in front of a live audience here at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael, California.
Today we bring you highlights from our &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special. We begin with debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News.
BOB SCHIEFFER : The first segment is the challenge of a changing Middle East and the new face of terrorism. I&#8217;m going to put this into two segments so you&#8217;ll have two topic questions within this one segment on the subject. The first question—and it concerns Libya. The controversy over what happened there continues. Four Americans are dead, including an American ambassador. Questions remain: What happened? What caused it? Was it spontaneous? Was it an intelligence failure? Was it a policy failure? Was there an attempt to mislead people about what really happened?
Governor Romney, you said this was an example of an American policy in the Middle East that is unraveling before our very eyes. I&#8217;d like to hear each of you give your thoughts on that. Governor Romney, you won the toss. You go first.
MITT ROMNEY : Thank you, Bob. And thank you for agreeing to moderate this debate this evening. Thank you to Lynn University for welcoming us here. And Mr. President, it&#8217;s good to be with you again. We were together at a humorous event a little earlier, and it&#8217;s nice to maybe be funny this time, not on purpose. We&#8217;ll see what happens.
This is obviously an area of great concern to the entire world, and to America, in particular, which is to see a complete change in the—the structure and the—the environment in the Middle East.
With the Arab Spring came a great deal of hope that there would be a change towards more moderation and opportunity for greater participation on the part of women in public life and in economic life in the Middle East. But instead, we&#8217;ve seen, in nation after nation, a number of disturbing events.
Of course, we see in Syria 30,000 civilians having been killed by the military there. We see in—in Libya, an attack apparently by—I think we know now—by terrorists of some kind against—against our people there, four people dead. Our hearts and—and minds go to them. Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali, by al-Qaeda-type individuals. We have in—in Egypt, a Muslim Brotherhood president. And so, what we&#8217;re seeing is a pretty dramatic reversal in the kind of hopes we had for that region. And, of course, the greatest threat of all is Iran, four years closer to a nuclear weapon.
And—and we&#8217;re going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done. I congratulate him on—on taking out Osama bin Laden and going after the leadership in al-Qaeda. But we can&#8217;t kill our way out of this mess. We&#8217;re going to have to put in place a very comprehensive and robust strategy to help the—the world of Islam and other parts of the world reject this radical violent extremism, which is—it&#8217;s certainly not on the run. It&#8217;s certainly not hiding. This is a group that is now involved in 10 or 12 countries, and it presents an enormous threat to our friends, to the world, to America, long term, and we must have a comprehensive strategy to help reject this kind of extremism.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Mr. President.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Well, my first job as commander-in-chief, Bob, is to keep the American people safe. And that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done over the last four years. We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11. And as a consequence, al-Qaeda&#8217;s core leadership has been decimated. In addition, we&#8217;re now able to transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way, making sure that Afghans take responsibility for their own security. And that allows us also to rebuild alliances and make friends around the world to combat future threats.
Now, with respect to Libya, as I indicated in the last debate, when we received that phone call, I immediately made sure that, number one, we did everything we could to secure those Americans who were still in harm&#8217;s way; number two, that we would investigate exactly what happened; and number three, most importantly, that we would go after those who killed Americans, and we would bring them to justice. And that&#8217;s exactly what we&#8217;re going to do.
But I think it&#8217;s important to step back and think about what happened in Libya. And keep in mind that I and Americans took leadership in organizing an international coalition that made sure that we were able to, without putting troops on the ground, at the cost of less than what we spent in two weeks in Iraq, liberate a country that had been under the yoke of dictatorship for 40 years, got rid of a despot who had killed Americans. And as a consequence, despite this tragedy, you had tens of thousands of Libyans after the events in Benghazi marching and saying, &quot;America is our friend. We stand with them.&quot;
Now, that represents the opportunity we have to take advantage of. And, you know, Governor Romney, I&#8217;m glad that you agree that we have been successful in going after al-Qaeda, but I have to tell you that, you know, your strategy previously has been one that has been all over the map and is not designed to keep Americans safe or to build on the opportunities that exist in the Middle East.
AMY GOODMAN : Third-party candidate, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, you have two minutes to respond to the question about the situation in Libya.
DR. JILL STEIN : Thank you, Amy, and thank you so much to Democracy Now! for expanding this debate in a way that&#8217;s absolutely essential. And as we are getting set up here, I couldn&#8217;t hear all of the comments of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but I&#8217;ll respond generally to the issue of Libya and the tragic events at the embassy.
And, you know, it&#8217;s very clear that there is blowback going on now across the Middle East, not only the unrest directed at the Libyan embassy, likewise at the embassies really across the Middle East, including in Egypt. We are seeing in Afghanistan our soldiers are being shot at by the police forces that they are supposed to be training in Afghanistan. We&#8217;re seeing in Pakistan that 75 percent of Pakistanis actually identify the United States now as their enemy, not as their supporter or their ally. And, you know, in many ways, we&#8217;re seeing a very ill-conceived, irresponsible and immoral war policy come back to haunt us, where United States foreign policies have been based, unfortunately, on brute military force and wars for oil.
Under my administration, we will have a foreign policy based on international law and human rights and the use of diplomacy. And instead of fighting wars for oil, we will be leading—as America, we will be leading the fight to put an end to climate change. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we have spent about $5 trillion. We have seen thousands and thousands of American lives lost, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives lost, about a trillion dollars a year being spent on a massive, bloated military-industrial-security budget. Instead, we need to cut that military budget, rightsize it to year 2000 levels, and build true security here at home, bringing our war dollars home.
AMY GOODMAN : Rocky Anderson, presidential candidate of the Justice Party, you have two minutes.
ROCKY ANDERSON : Thank you.
The question was whether the killings at the embassy in Libya were a policy failure, whether they reflected a policy failure. And it is so clear to everyone that the policy failure has been in the way the United States has treated so many nations in the Middle East. We&#8217;re like the bully that never got counseling, and we keep wondering, why don&#8217;t they like us?
We invaded Iraq and occupied that country. It was completely illegal. Two United Nations secretaries-general declared that it was illegal. It was a war of aggression, and it was all done on a pack of lies. Now, we aggravate the situation by keeping bases in so many other nations, including Saudi Arabia, bolstering these tyrants and, at the same time, engaging in direct, unmanned drone strikes in at least four sovereign nations, killing, in the process, hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent men, women and children. That is the policy failure: our belligerence, our efforts to control, to dominate and to make certain that we will always have that control over the resources in these nations. That&#8217;s what this is all about.
We took over the government. We overthrew the Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1953. We&#8217;re still paying a heavy price for that. We have a history of doing that in this country. And I think that the American people have finally got it, that we need to start building friendly relationships with these nations and not go around with the kinds of belligerence where not only do we attack these countries, but Mitt Romney calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe, for heaven&#8217;s sakes, when we ought to be working with Russia to bring about a peaceful resolution of what&#8217;s happening in Syria. So, this is a holistic problem with a—an imperialist foreign policy that we have to turn around, and the American people can see to it if we join together.
AMY GOODMAN : Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson. When we come back, we&#8217;ll continue with our &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special and get responses from all four candidates to moderator Bob Schieffer&#8217;s next question on the Middle East, which focused on Syria.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We continue with our &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special, adding the voices of two third-party presidential candidates excluded from last night&#8217;s debate: Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. This is debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Let me interject the second topic question in this segment about the Middle East and so on, and that is, you both mentioned—alluded to this, and that is Syria. War in Syria has now spilled over into Lebanon. We have, what, more than a hundred people that were killed there in a bomb. There were demonstrations there, eight people dead.
Mr. President, it&#8217;s been more than a year since you saw—you told Assad he had to go. Since then, 30,000 Syrians have died. We&#8217;ve had 300,000 refugees. The war goes on. He&#8217;s still there. Should we reassess our policy and see if we can find a better way to influence events there? Or is that even possible? And it&#8217;s you—you go first, sir.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : What we&#8217;ve done is organize the international community, saying Assad has to go. We&#8217;ve mobilized sanctions against that government. We have made sure that they are isolated. We have provided humanitarian assistance. And we are helping the opposition organize, and we&#8217;re particularly interested in making sure that we&#8217;re mobilizing the moderate forces inside of Syria.
But ultimately, Syrians are going to have to determine their own future. And so, everything we&#8217;re doing, we&#8217;re doing in consultation with our partners in the region, including Israel, which obviously has a huge interest in seeing what happens in Syria; coordinating with Turkey and other countries in the region that have a great interest in this.
Now, this—what we&#8217;re seeing taking place in Syria is heartbreaking. And that&#8217;s why we are going to do everything we can to make sure that we are helping the opposition. But we also have to recognize that, you know, for us to get more entangled militarily in Syria is a serious step, and we have to do so making absolutely certain that we know who we are helping, that we&#8217;re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or our allies in the region.
And I am confident that Assad&#8217;s days are numbered. But what we can&#8217;t do is to simply suggest that, as Governor Romney at times has suggested, that giving heavy weapons, for example, to the Syrian opposition is a simple proposition that would lead us to be safer over the long term.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Governor?
MITT ROMNEY : Well, let&#8217;s step back and talk about what&#8217;s happening in Syria and how important it is. First of all, 30,000 people being killed by their government is a humanitarian disaster.
Secondly, Syria is an opportunity for us, because Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now. Syria is Iran&#8217;s only ally in the Arab world. It&#8217;s their route to the sea. It&#8217;s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally, Israel. And so, seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for us. Number two, seeing a—the replacement government being responsible people is critical for us. And finally, we don&#8217;t want to have military involvement there. We don&#8217;t want to get drawn into a military conflict.
And so, the right course for us is working through our partners and with our own resources to identify responsible parties within Syria, organize them, bring them together in a—in a form of—not—if not government, a form of—of council that can take the lead in Syria, and then make sure they have the arms necessary to defend themselves. We do need to make sure that they don&#8217;t have arms that get into the—the wrong hands. Those arms could be used to hurt us down the road. We need to make sure, as well, that we coordinate this effort with our allies, and particularly with—with Israel. But the Saudis and the Qatari and—and the Turks are all very concerned about this. They&#8217;re willing to work with us.
We need to have a very effective leadership effort in Syria, making sure that the—the insurgents there are armed and that the insurgents that become armed are people who will be the responsible parties. Recognize—I believe that Assad must go. I believe he will go. But I believe we want to make sure that we have the relationships of friendship with the people that take his place, such that in the years to come we see Syria as a—as a friend and Syria as a responsible party in the Middle East.
This—this is a critical opportunity for America. And what I&#8217;m afraid of is that we&#8217;ve watched, over the past year or so, first the president saying, &quot;Well, we&#8217;ll let the U.N. deal with it.&quot; And Assad—excuse me, Kofi Annan came in and said, &quot;We&#8217;re going to try to have a ceasefire.&quot; That didn&#8217;t work. Then it looked to the Russians and said, &quot;Let&#8217;s see if you can do something.&quot; We should be playing the leadership role there, not on the ground with military.
BOB SCHIEFFER : All right.
MITT ROMNEY : But play the leadership role.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : We are playing the leadership role.
AMY GOODMAN : Syria—first to Rocky Anderson, Justice Party presidential candidate.
ROCKY ANDERSON : We probably just heard the greatest example of why we need to open up these presidential debates, because the premises under which both of these candidates are operating—the constricted debate does such a disservice to the people of this country.
What do we hear? We hear President Obama say we&#8217;ve got to do everything we can to help the opposition, and Mitt Romney is saying we ought to be shipping them heavy arms. This is a call for a bloodbath in Syria. Many in the internal opposition in Syria—and I&#8217;m not talking about the outsiders, the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are helping arm them, and even the Salafis, who are associated with al-Qaeda, going in and helping build bombs for the opposition. Is this really what we want as a country?
We have no business doing anything other than working with Russia and helping to bring about a peaceful resolution. And it can be done. There are many in the internal opposition in Syria that want exactly that approach. And they&#8217;re saying—and I think probably the best thing that&#8217;s been written about this recently is Jonathan Steele&#8217;s excellent article in the latest Nation magazine. What they want is for the international community to butt out, except for helping bring about a diplomatic, peaceful resolution. And as so many of them say, you&#8217;re not going to get any democratic advances through more violence in Syria.
AMY GOODMAN : Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.
DR. JILL STEIN : Yes, and it&#8217;s as if there&#8217;s collective amnesia here, as if we didn&#8217;t just go through a decade, $5 trillion and thousands of U.S. soldiers whose lives have been sacrificed, and far more civilians whose lives have been lost, in an attempted military resolution to these civil and religious strife. And we see that in spite of putting the full force of the United States military and NATO and trillions of dollars in a decade, we have not, with all the power of that force, been able to resolve these conflicts on the ground in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So, how in the world, with a far smaller commitment—given the colossal failure of the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, how in the world are they thinking that a lesser degree of military intervention is going to solve the problem?
ROCKY ANDERSON : But I don&#8217;t think that the problem here is that we failed. I think the problem is that we&#8217;re trying to assert our will and dictate the result. Can you imagine if there were Muslim countries coming into the United States and occupying us, invading us, telling us how—where to run our government and then running unmanned drones over Canada, Mexico, the United States, determining who is going to live and who&#8217;s going to die, and in the process killing hundreds, if not thousands—we don&#8217;t know how many—innocent men, women and children? It&#8217;s an outrage. And our national security is at risk long-term, because of the hostility and hatred that we&#8217;re generating throughout that part of the world. We have got to turn this around. And we, the American people, can do it.
DR. JILL STEIN : Absolutely. And, in fact, this is a failed policy from the get-go. It&#8217;s not only failed in its impact; it&#8217;s failed from its very conception. As the human rights head for the United Nations, Navi Pillay, points out, that with arms flowing in to both sides in Syria, you have really a catastrophe in the making. We need to stop the flow of the arms. And in fact, the United States and the Obama government, in fact, undermined an international treaty that would have begun to slow down the international flow of arms. So the American role here has actually been to throw gasoline on the fires of virtually every ethnic, religious and national conflict around the Middle East through its—through its militaristic export of arms and the profiteering war industry.
BOB SCHIEFFER : I&#8217;d like to move to the next segment: red lines, Israel and Iran. Would either of you—and you&#8217;ll have two minutes—and, President Obama, you have the first go at this one. Would either of you be willing to declare that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States, which of course is the same promise that we give to our close allies like Japan? And if you made such a declaration, would not that deter Iran? It&#8217;s certainly deterred the Soviet Union for a long, long time, when we made that—we made—we made that promise to our allies. Mr. President?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Well, first of all, Israel is a true friend. It is our greatest ally in the region. And if Israel is attacked, America will stand with Israel. I&#8217;ve made that clear throughout my presidency.
BOB SCHIEFFER : So you&#8217;re—
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : And—
BOB SCHIEFFER : You&#8217;re saying we&#8217;ve already made that declaration.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : I will stand with Israel if they are attacked. And this is the reason why, working with Israel, we have created the strongest military and intelligence cooperation between our two countries in history. In fact, this week we&#8217;ll be carrying out the largest military exercise with Israel in history, this very week.
But to the issue of Iran, as long as I&#8217;m president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. I made that clear when I came into office. We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy. Their currency has dropped 80 percent. Their oil production has plunged to the lowest levels since they were fighting a war with Iraq 20 years ago. So their economy is in a shambles.
And the reason we did this is because a nuclear Iran is a threat to our national security, and it&#8217;s a threat to Israel&#8217;s national security. We cannot afford to have a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. And for them to be able to provide nuclear technology to non-state actors, that&#8217;s unacceptable. And they have said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.
So, the work that we&#8217;ve done with respect to sanctions now offers Iran a choice: they can take the diplomatic route and end their nuclear program, or they will have to face a united world and a United States president, me, who said we&#8217;re not going to take any options off the table.
The disagreement I have with Governor Romney is that, during the course of this campaign, he&#8217;s often talked as if we should take premature military action. I think that would be a mistake, because when I&#8217;ve sent young men and women into harm&#8217;s way, I always understand that that is the last resort, not the first resort.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Two minutes.
MITT ROMNEY : Well, first of all, I want to underscore the same point the president made, which is that if I&#8217;m president of the United States—when I&#8217;m president of the United States, we will stand with Israel. And if Israel is attacked, we have their back, not just diplomatically, not just culturally, but militarily. That&#8217;s number one.
Number two, with regards to—to Iran and the threat of Iran, there&#8217;s no question but that a nuclear Iran, a nuclear-capable Iran is unacceptable to America. It presents a threat not only to our friends, but ultimately a threat to us, to have Iran have nuclear material, nuclear weapons that could be used against us or to use to be threatening to us.
It&#8217;s also essential for us to understand what our mission is in Iran, and that is to dissuade Iran from having a nuclear weapon through peaceful and diplomatic means. And crippling sanctions are something I called for five years ago, when I was in Israel, speaking at the Herzliya Conference. I laid out seven steps. Crippling sanctions were number one. And they do work. You&#8217;re seeing it right now in the economy. It&#8217;s absolutely the right thing to do, to have crippling sanctions. I would have put them in place earlier, but it&#8217;s good that we have them.
Number two, something I would add today is I would tighten those sanctions. I would say that ships that carry Iranian oil can&#8217;t come into our ports. I imagine the EU would agree with this, as well. Not only ships couldn&#8217;t, I&#8217;d say companies that are moving their oil can&#8217;t, people who are trading in their oil can&#8217;t. I would tighten those sanctions further.
Secondly, I&#8217;d take on diplomatic isolation efforts. I&#8217;d make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it. I would also make sure that their diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world, the same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.
We need to increase pressure, time and time again, on Iran because anything other than a—a solution to this, which says—which stops this—this nuclear folly of theirs, is unacceptable to America. And, of course, a military action is the last resort. It is something one would only—only consider if all of the other avenues had been—had been tried to their full extent.
AMY GOODMAN : Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson, you have two minutes.
ROCKY ANDERSON : This is so predictable. Once again, President Obama repeats the lie that President Ahmadinejad in Iran stated that he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. He never said it. He referred to the regime in Israel one day being in the dustbin of history. It was a misinterpretation, and it is so warmongering of both of these candidates to talk about how they will basically blow Iran away.
Romney wants to impose crippling sanctions. Who would he be crippling? He&#8217;d be crippling, among others, some of the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in Tehran in a candlelight vigil in sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. And by the way, the people in the United States have stood in solidarity with the Iranian people after their last election with candlelight vigils in this country. It&#8217;s time that the people of both nations express their solidarity with one another and express our disdain, our disgust with these leaders who are engaging in this conduct that is ultimately going to lead to utter tragedy for the people of Iran.
Would Mitt Romney say that we should go over and attack North Korea because they have a nuclear bomb? How about Pakistan? How about China? How about Russia? We have an obligation, number one, to start reducing the number of nuclear weapons and provide that kind of leadership, because it&#8217;s the United States who has led the way for other nations to build up their nuclear armaments. And if Iran feels like they&#8217;re going to be attacked—and that&#8217;s all they&#8217;re hearing nowadays—of course they&#8217;re going to consider building a nuclear capability to deter an attack. But there is no evidence that they have any nuclear capability. And it&#8217;s an utter lie, totally baseless, for Mitt Romney to say that Iran is four years closer to building a nuclear weapon.
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Jill Stein.
DR. JILL STEIN : And here again, we&#8217;re seeing the candidates very similar to each other. They&#8217;re both saber-rattling about Iran. They&#8217;re both vowing their obedience to the right-wing government in Israel. And they are both saying that they will stop at nothing, but that war will be the last result. So, once again, we&#8217;re seeing shades of gray here between the Democratic and Republican candidates, but we&#8217;re not seeing what the American people really need and what international security really needs.
In fact, Iran recently hosted the non-aligned nations. It&#8217;s not just Iran. It was all the non-aligned nations with them—Brazil and Argentina and many others—that together put forward a proposal for eliminating nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East and, in fact, eliminating nuclear weapons throughout the world. That is the true solution that we should be getting behind. And in fact, I should add that—
AMY GOODMAN : Ten seconds.
DR. JILL STEIN : —this—this slave-like mentality towards Israel is absolutely unjustified. We need to start raising the bar for Israel and holding them to an equal standard for supporting human rights and international law and ending occupations and illegal settlements and apartheid.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. When we continue with our &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special after the break, all four candidates discuss the military budget. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We continue with our &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special, including two third-party presidential candidates excluded from last night&#8217;s debate: Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. During a special broadcast Monday night, we broke the sound barrier during the Obama-Romney debate to get real-time responses from Stein and Anderson. We also invited Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson; he declined to join us. This is debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Governor, you say you want a bigger military. You want a bigger Navy. You don&#8217;t want to cut defense spending. What I want to ask you—we were talking about financial problems in this country. Where are you going to get the money?
MITT ROMNEY : Well, let&#8217;s—let&#8217;s come back and talk about the military, but all the way—all the way through. First of all—I&#8217;m going through, from the very beginning—we&#8217;re going to cut about 5 percent of the discretionary budget, excluding military. That&#8217;s number one. All right? And that&#8217;s—
BOB SCHIEFFER : But can you do this without—
MITT ROMNEY : You know, the good—the good news is—
BOB SCHIEFFER : —driving us deeper into debt?
MITT ROMNEY : I&#8217;ll—I&#8217;ll be happy to have you take a look. Come on our website. You look at how we get to a balanced budget within eight to 10 years. We do it by getting—by reducing spending in a whole series of programs. By the way, number one I get rid of is &quot;Obamacare.&quot; There are a number of things that sound good, but frankly, we just can&#8217;t afford them. And that one doesn&#8217;t sound good, and it&#8217;s not affordable. So I&#8217;d get rid of that one from day one. To the extent humanly possible, we get that out. We take program after program that we don&#8217;t absolutely have to have, and we get rid of them.
Number two, we take some programs that we are going to keep, like Medicaid, which is a program for the poor—we&#8217;re—take that healthcare program for the poor, and we give it to the states to run, because states run these programs more efficiently. As a governor, I thought, please, give me this program. I can—
BOB SCHIEFFER : Can he do that, Mr. President?
MITT ROMNEY : I can run this more efficiently than the federal government. And states, by the way, are proving it. States like Arizona, Rhode Island have taken these—these Medicaid dollars, have shown they can run these programs more cost-effectively.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Bob, but—
MITT ROMNEY : And so, I want to do those two things and get this—get this to a balanced budget with eight—in eight to 10 years.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Bob—
BOB SCHIEFFER : Let&#8217;s—
MITT ROMNEY : But the military—let&#8217;s—let&#8217;s get back to the military, though.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Well—
BOB SCHIEFFER : That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m trying to find out about.
MITT ROMNEY : Well, let&#8217;s—let&#8217;s talk about the military.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : I want to—you should have answered the first question.
Look, Governor Romney has called for $5 trillion of tax cuts that he says he&#8217;s going to pay for by closing deductions. Now, the math doesn&#8217;t work, but he continues to claim that he&#8217;s going to do it. He then wants to spend another $2 trillion on military spending that our military is not asking for.
Now, keep in mind that our military spending has gone up every single year that I&#8217;ve been in office. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined—China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, you name it, next 10. And what I did was work with our Joint Chiefs of Staff to think about what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe. And that&#8217;s the budget that we&#8217;ve put forward.
But what you can&#8217;t do is spend $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military is not asking for, $5 trillion on tax cuts. You say that you&#8217;re going to pay for it by closing loopholes and deductions, without naming what those loopholes and deductions are. And then somehow you&#8217;re also going to deal with the deficit that we&#8217;ve already got. The math simply doesn&#8217;t work.
But when it comes to our military, what we have to think about is not, you know, just budgets; we&#8217;ve got to think about capabilities. We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be thinking about space. That&#8217;s exactly what our budget does, but it&#8217;s driven by strategy. It&#8217;s not driven by politics. It&#8217;s not driven by members of Congress and what they would like to see. It&#8217;s driven by what are we going to need to keep the American people safe. That&#8217;s exactly what our budget does. And it also then allows us to reduce our deficit, which is a significant national security concern, because we&#8217;ve got to make sure that our economy is strong at home so that we can project military power overseas.
MITT ROMNEY : Bob, I&#8217;m pleased that I&#8217;ve balanced budgets. I was in the world of business for 25 years. If you didn&#8217;t balance your budget, you went out of business. I went to the Olympics, that was out of balance, and we got it on balance and made a success there. I had the chance to be governor of a state. Four years in a row, Democrats and Republicans came together to balance the budget. We cut taxes 19 times, balanced our budget. The president hasn&#8217;t balanced a budget yet. I expect to have the opportunity to do so myself.
BOB SCHIEFFER : All right.
MITT ROMNEY : I&#8217;m going to be able to balance the budget.
Let&#8217;s talk about military spending. And that&#8217;s this.
BOB SCHIEFFER : About 30 seconds.
MITT ROMNEY : Our Navy—our Navy is older—excuse me, our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We&#8217;re now down to 285. We&#8217;re headed down to the—to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That&#8217;s unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy. Our Air Force is older and smaller than any time since it was founded in 1947. We&#8217;ve changed, for the first time since FDR , we—since FDR , we had the—we&#8217;ve always had the strategy of saying we could fight in two conflicts at once. Now we&#8217;re changing to one conflict.
Look, this, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the president of the United States, which is to maintain the safety of the American people. And I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts that the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making—is making our future less certain and less secure, and I won&#8217;t do it.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Bob, I just need to comment on this.
First of all, the sequester is not something that I proposed. It&#8217;s something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen. The budget that we&#8217;re talking about is not reducing our military spending; it&#8217;s maintaining it.
But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn&#8217;t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so, the question is not a game of Battleship where we&#8217;re counting ships; it&#8217;s what are our capabilities.
And so, when I sit down with the secretary of the Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we determine how are we going to be best able to meet all of our defense needs in a way that also keeps faith with our troops, that also makes sure that our veterans have the kind of support that they need when they come home. And that is not reflected in the kind of budget that you&#8217;re putting forward, because it just doesn&#8217;t work.
BOB SCHIEFFER : All right.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : And, you know, we visited the website quite a bit, and it still doesn&#8217;t work.
BOB SCHIEFFER : A lot to cover. I&#8217;d like—I&#8217;d like—
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, on this issue of military spending.
DR. JILL STEIN : Yeah, well, I think they both made the case for us, that the numbers just don&#8217;t add up. We cannot continue spending a trillion dollars a year on this bloated military-industrial-security complex without having to really pay the price here at home. And they&#8217;re talking about, you know, a balanced budget. They&#8217;re talking about needing to educate our students.
You know, let&#8217;s look at where that money is going. We are spending trillions every year not only on the bloated military budget, but on the wars for oil as part of that, as well as the bailouts for Wall Street and tax breaks for the very wealthy. And unfortunately, we don&#8217;t see either of these candidates—not the Democrats and not the Republicans—really changing any of those really serious problems. Right now, the Federal Reserve is again bailing out Wall Street, effectively for the fourth time. This is the third quantitative easing on top of the TARP program, which was $700 billion. But that $700 billion under George Bush has become many, many trillions under Barack Obama. So these bailouts continue, and now we&#8217;re doing a quantitative easing to the tune of $40 billion every month, again to bail out the banks. It&#8217;s time to be breaking up the big banks and bailing out the students instead. They&#8217;ve got it the other way around: they&#8217;re breaking up the students and bailing out the banks. And we need to put an end to that.
Likewise, we are squandering trillions of dollars over the coming decade on a massive, wasteful health insurance, private health insurance bureaucracy. And the alternative to austerity is actually moving to a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system, which makes austerity unnecessary. So, in fact, by moving to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, we get a system that people are happy with, that they love and want to defend from government tampering, in fact, and that system covers everyone comprehensively, puts you back in charge of your healthcare, and, in addition, it actually saves us trillions over the coming decade, equivalent to that austerity plan that they were talking about. And the way it does that is by changing—what we have right now is 30 percent of every healthcare dollar is being spent on bureaucracy, red tape and paper pushing. Under Medicare, that 30 percent shrinks down to 2 to 3 percent. That&#8217;s enough to cover everybody. And—and we deserve that.
Now, in addition, under Medicare for all, this healthcare inflation, which is going like this on the curve of expenses over time, much faster—it&#8217;s inflating much faster than a inflation in the economy. But what happens when you move to a Medicare-for-all system is that that hyperinflation in healthcare, with your premiums and your co-pays going up practically every month, that is put an end to. So we go back to an inflation level like the level of the economy, and that saves us trillions of dollars over the coming decade.
So, these are the ways that we should be spending our tax dollars, not on the military, but on what we need here at home. And by conserving those dollars instead of squandering them, we can actually spend them on the things that we need, on bailing out the students and on creating public higher education, which is free, tuition-free, the way that it should be.
AMY GOODMAN : Justice Party presidential candidate, former Salt Lake City mayor, Rocky Anderson.
ROCKY ANDERSON : Well, we&#8217;ve heard another great example of how the Republican and Democratic candidates for president, just like their cohorts in Congress, are basically one and the same in terms of their corporatism and their militarism. It&#8217;s just a matter of degree.
President Obama is bragging about increasing military spending these last four years? Well, this is how it works. The F-22 weapons program, Republicans and Democrats alike tried to keep it alive, even though the secretary of defense said it&#8217;s an outmoded system, we&#8217;ve never used it, we&#8217;re not going to use it—billions of dollars going into the system just for maintenance and repair. And it was Republicans and Democrats fighting for continued funding. And then you wonder, why would they do that? It&#8217;s because the general contractor for that weapon system—they know what they&#8217;re doing when it comes to Congress—they put in place contractors or subcontractors in 44 different states. So you had Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and the Republican from Utah&#8217;s 1st Congressional District all fighting for continued funding, because they wanted to take the bacon back home so they could brag about it when they run the next time. That is treasonous conduct, when people are looking out for their own political interests and hammering the American people, especially when there are so many unmet needs in this country.
Mitt Romney is one of the greatest flim-flam mans—men of all time. He says we&#8217;re going to start with a $16 trillion debt, we&#8217;re going to give everybody a 20 percent tax cut, and then we&#8217;re going to do away with some deductions. But have you noticed he&#8217;s never identified what those deductions are going to be? Well, the studies say—people have taken a look at this—really, even if he did away with mortgage deductions and charitable deductions, which he&#8217;s not likely to do, if you take all of those deductions, you can&#8217;t give more than 4 percent in tax cuts without adding to our deficit, so there is no way that he could meet anywhere near these promises of balancing the budget. Instead, we would see more like we saw under the Reagan and the second Bush administrations, with record deficits with these Republican presidents.
Now, in terms of jobs, our employers in this country are at a huge competitive disadvantage with their competitors overseas, because we are the only nation in the entire developed world that doesn&#8217;t provide insurance coverage for everyone, and we&#8217;re paying more than twice the average of the rest of the industrialized world. And we&#8217;re getting far worse medical outcomes. More than 70 percent of the American people and the majority of doctors during the healthcare debate said they wanted to see a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system in place. And this president wouldn&#8217;t even let the proposal see the light of day, because he, like the rest of the members in Congress, with the exception of a handful who were courageous enough, at least for a while, to stand up against the corrupting money, they caved in to the for-profit insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies. And once again, we end up getting shafted, the American people, again. We can&#8217;t stand for it anymore. We need to send a message: there are going to be political consequences every time the corporate sector wins out over the interests of the American people.
AMY GOODMAN : Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson. That concludes our final &quot;Expanding the Debate&quot; special, adding the voices of third-party presidential candidates excluded from the debate. To see the full expanded final debate , go to our website at democracynow.org. Oh, and tune in to our special election night coverage.
Well, our 100-city Silenced Majority Election 2012 tour continues today in Palo Alto, California , at the First Presbyterian Church at 1140 Cowper Street at 7:00 p.m. On Wednesday at 7:00 p.m., I&#8217;ll be speaking at the World Affairs Council at the Marines Memorial Club &amp; Hotel, 609 Sutter Street in San Francisco . Thursday, I&#8217;ll be in Portland, Oregon , at 7:00 p.m. at the Historic Bob White Theatre at 6423 SE Foster Road. Then on Friday, noon, Olympia, Washington ; at 7:30 p.m., Seattle Town Hall. Saturday, I&#8217;ll be speaking in Everett and Spokane . Sunday, we&#8217;ll travel to Bend, Oregon , and the Ashland, Oregon , at 7:00. We head to Salt Lake City ; Peoria, Illinois; St. Louis ; Kansas City ; Houston ; then New York City the night before the election. AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the road in our 100-city tour in San Rafael, California.

President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney squared off Monday night in Boca Raton, Florida, in their final presidential debate before the November 6 general election. In a debate focused on foreign policy, both candidates agreed on a number of issues, including the secret drone war, U.S. support for Israel, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, and their opposition to U.S. military involvement in Syria. But they clashed over military spending, Iran and Libya. Several key international issues were not addressed at all, including climate change, the economic crisis in Europe, and the U.S.-backed drug war in Latin America.

Last night, Democracy Now! broke the sound barrier once again by adding the voices of two third-party presidential candidates that were excluded from the debate: Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. We aired the Obama-Romney debate, pausing the tape after each question to give Dr. Stein and Rocky Anderson a chance to respond to the same questions put to the major-party candidates. We also invited Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, but he declined to join us. We recorded the show in front of a live audience here at the Osher Marin Jewish Community Center in San Rafael, California.

Today we bring you highlights from our "Expanding the Debate" special. We begin with debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News.

BOBSCHIEFFER: The first segment is the challenge of a changing Middle East and the new face of terrorism. I’m going to put this into two segments so you’ll have two topic questions within this one segment on the subject. The first question—and it concerns Libya. The controversy over what happened there continues. Four Americans are dead, including an American ambassador. Questions remain: What happened? What caused it? Was it spontaneous? Was it an intelligence failure? Was it a policy failure? Was there an attempt to mislead people about what really happened?

Governor Romney, you said this was an example of an American policy in the Middle East that is unraveling before our very eyes. I’d like to hear each of you give your thoughts on that. Governor Romney, you won the toss. You go first.

MITTROMNEY: Thank you, Bob. And thank you for agreeing to moderate this debate this evening. Thank you to Lynn University for welcoming us here. And Mr. President, it’s good to be with you again. We were together at a humorous event a little earlier, and it’s nice to maybe be funny this time, not on purpose. We’ll see what happens.

This is obviously an area of great concern to the entire world, and to America, in particular, which is to see a complete change in the—the structure and the—the environment in the Middle East.

With the Arab Spring came a great deal of hope that there would be a change towards more moderation and opportunity for greater participation on the part of women in public life and in economic life in the Middle East. But instead, we’ve seen, in nation after nation, a number of disturbing events.

Of course, we see in Syria 30,000 civilians having been killed by the military there. We see in—in Libya, an attack apparently by—I think we know now—by terrorists of some kind against—against our people there, four people dead. Our hearts and—and minds go to them. Mali has been taken over, the northern part of Mali, by al-Qaeda-type individuals. We have in—in Egypt, a Muslim Brotherhood president. And so, what we’re seeing is a pretty dramatic reversal in the kind of hopes we had for that region. And, of course, the greatest threat of all is Iran, four years closer to a nuclear weapon.

And—and we’re going to have to recognize that we have to do as the president has done. I congratulate him on—on taking out Osama bin Laden and going after the leadership in al-Qaeda. But we can’t kill our way out of this mess. We’re going to have to put in place a very comprehensive and robust strategy to help the—the world of Islam and other parts of the world reject this radical violent extremism, which is—it’s certainly not on the run. It’s certainly not hiding. This is a group that is now involved in 10 or 12 countries, and it presents an enormous threat to our friends, to the world, to America, long term, and we must have a comprehensive strategy to help reject this kind of extremism.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Mr. President.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Well, my first job as commander-in-chief, Bob, is to keep the American people safe. And that’s what we’ve done over the last four years. We ended the war in Iraq, refocused our attention on those who actually killed us on 9/11. And as a consequence, al-Qaeda’s core leadership has been decimated. In addition, we’re now able to transition out of Afghanistan in a responsible way, making sure that Afghans take responsibility for their own security. And that allows us also to rebuild alliances and make friends around the world to combat future threats.

Now, with respect to Libya, as I indicated in the last debate, when we received that phone call, I immediately made sure that, number one, we did everything we could to secure those Americans who were still in harm’s way; number two, that we would investigate exactly what happened; and number three, most importantly, that we would go after those who killed Americans, and we would bring them to justice. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

But I think it’s important to step back and think about what happened in Libya. And keep in mind that I and Americans took leadership in organizing an international coalition that made sure that we were able to, without putting troops on the ground, at the cost of less than what we spent in two weeks in Iraq, liberate a country that had been under the yoke of dictatorship for 40 years, got rid of a despot who had killed Americans. And as a consequence, despite this tragedy, you had tens of thousands of Libyans after the events in Benghazi marching and saying, "America is our friend. We stand with them."

Now, that represents the opportunity we have to take advantage of. And, you know, Governor Romney, I’m glad that you agree that we have been successful in going after al-Qaeda, but I have to tell you that, you know, your strategy previously has been one that has been all over the map and is not designed to keep Americans safe or to build on the opportunities that exist in the Middle East.

AMYGOODMAN: Third-party candidate, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, you have two minutes to respond to the question about the situation in Libya.

DR. JILLSTEIN: Thank you, Amy, and thank you so much to Democracy Now! for expanding this debate in a way that’s absolutely essential. And as we are getting set up here, I couldn’t hear all of the comments of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, but I’ll respond generally to the issue of Libya and the tragic events at the embassy.

And, you know, it’s very clear that there is blowback going on now across the Middle East, not only the unrest directed at the Libyan embassy, likewise at the embassies really across the Middle East, including in Egypt. We are seeing in Afghanistan our soldiers are being shot at by the police forces that they are supposed to be training in Afghanistan. We’re seeing in Pakistan that 75 percent of Pakistanis actually identify the United States now as their enemy, not as their supporter or their ally. And, you know, in many ways, we’re seeing a very ill-conceived, irresponsible and immoral war policy come back to haunt us, where United States foreign policies have been based, unfortunately, on brute military force and wars for oil.

Under my administration, we will have a foreign policy based on international law and human rights and the use of diplomacy. And instead of fighting wars for oil, we will be leading—as America, we will be leading the fight to put an end to climate change. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we have spent about $5 trillion. We have seen thousands and thousands of American lives lost, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives lost, about a trillion dollars a year being spent on a massive, bloated military-industrial-security budget. Instead, we need to cut that military budget, rightsize it to year 2000 levels, and build true security here at home, bringing our war dollars home.

AMYGOODMAN: Rocky Anderson, presidential candidate of the Justice Party, you have two minutes.

ROCKYANDERSON: Thank you.

The question was whether the killings at the embassy in Libya were a policy failure, whether they reflected a policy failure. And it is so clear to everyone that the policy failure has been in the way the United States has treated so many nations in the Middle East. We’re like the bully that never got counseling, and we keep wondering, why don’t they like us?

We invaded Iraq and occupied that country. It was completely illegal. Two United Nations secretaries-general declared that it was illegal. It was a war of aggression, and it was all done on a pack of lies. Now, we aggravate the situation by keeping bases in so many other nations, including Saudi Arabia, bolstering these tyrants and, at the same time, engaging in direct, unmanned drone strikes in at least four sovereign nations, killing, in the process, hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent men, women and children. That is the policy failure: our belligerence, our efforts to control, to dominate and to make certain that we will always have that control over the resources in these nations. That’s what this is all about.

We took over the government. We overthrew the Mosaddegh government in Iran in 1953. We’re still paying a heavy price for that. We have a history of doing that in this country. And I think that the American people have finally got it, that we need to start building friendly relationships with these nations and not go around with the kinds of belligerence where not only do we attack these countries, but Mitt Romney calling Russia our greatest geopolitical foe, for heaven’s sakes, when we ought to be working with Russia to bring about a peaceful resolution of what’s happening in Syria. So, this is a holistic problem with a—an imperialist foreign policy that we have to turn around, and the American people can see to it if we join together.

AMYGOODMAN: Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson. When we come back, we’ll continue with our "Expanding the Debate" special and get responses from all four candidates to moderator Bob Schieffer’s next question on the Middle East, which focused on Syria.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We continue with our "Expanding the Debate" special, adding the voices of two third-party presidential candidates excluded from last night’s debate: Jill Stein, presidential candidate of the Green Party, and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. This is debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Let me interject the second topic question in this segment about the Middle East and so on, and that is, you both mentioned—alluded to this, and that is Syria. War in Syria has now spilled over into Lebanon. We have, what, more than a hundred people that were killed there in a bomb. There were demonstrations there, eight people dead.

Mr. President, it’s been more than a year since you saw—you told Assad he had to go. Since then, 30,000 Syrians have died. We’ve had 300,000 refugees. The war goes on. He’s still there. Should we reassess our policy and see if we can find a better way to influence events there? Or is that even possible? And it’s you—you go first, sir.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: What we’ve done is organize the international community, saying Assad has to go. We’ve mobilized sanctions against that government. We have made sure that they are isolated. We have provided humanitarian assistance. And we are helping the opposition organize, and we’re particularly interested in making sure that we’re mobilizing the moderate forces inside of Syria.

But ultimately, Syrians are going to have to determine their own future. And so, everything we’re doing, we’re doing in consultation with our partners in the region, including Israel, which obviously has a huge interest in seeing what happens in Syria; coordinating with Turkey and other countries in the region that have a great interest in this.

Now, this—what we’re seeing taking place in Syria is heartbreaking. And that’s why we are going to do everything we can to make sure that we are helping the opposition. But we also have to recognize that, you know, for us to get more entangled militarily in Syria is a serious step, and we have to do so making absolutely certain that we know who we are helping, that we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or our allies in the region.

And I am confident that Assad’s days are numbered. But what we can’t do is to simply suggest that, as Governor Romney at times has suggested, that giving heavy weapons, for example, to the Syrian opposition is a simple proposition that would lead us to be safer over the long term.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Governor?

MITTROMNEY: Well, let’s step back and talk about what’s happening in Syria and how important it is. First of all, 30,000 people being killed by their government is a humanitarian disaster.

Secondly, Syria is an opportunity for us, because Syria plays an important role in the Middle East, particularly right now. Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally, Israel. And so, seeing Syria remove Assad is a very high priority for us. Number two, seeing a—the replacement government being responsible people is critical for us. And finally, we don’t want to have military involvement there. We don’t want to get drawn into a military conflict.

And so, the right course for us is working through our partners and with our own resources to identify responsible parties within Syria, organize them, bring them together in a—in a form of—not—if not government, a form of—of council that can take the lead in Syria, and then make sure they have the arms necessary to defend themselves. We do need to make sure that they don’t have arms that get into the—the wrong hands. Those arms could be used to hurt us down the road. We need to make sure, as well, that we coordinate this effort with our allies, and particularly with—with Israel. But the Saudis and the Qatari and—and the Turks are all very concerned about this. They’re willing to work with us.

We need to have a very effective leadership effort in Syria, making sure that the—the insurgents there are armed and that the insurgents that become armed are people who will be the responsible parties. Recognize—I believe that Assad must go. I believe he will go. But I believe we want to make sure that we have the relationships of friendship with the people that take his place, such that in the years to come we see Syria as a—as a friend and Syria as a responsible party in the Middle East.

This—this is a critical opportunity for America. And what I’m afraid of is that we’ve watched, over the past year or so, first the president saying, "Well, we’ll let the U.N. deal with it." And Assad—excuse me, Kofi Annan came in and said, "We’re going to try to have a ceasefire." That didn’t work. Then it looked to the Russians and said, "Let’s see if you can do something." We should be playing the leadership role there, not on the ground with military.

ROCKYANDERSON: We probably just heard the greatest example of why we need to open up these presidential debates, because the premises under which both of these candidates are operating—the constricted debate does such a disservice to the people of this country.

What do we hear? We hear President Obama say we’ve got to do everything we can to help the opposition, and Mitt Romney is saying we ought to be shipping them heavy arms. This is a call for a bloodbath in Syria. Many in the internal opposition in Syria—and I’m not talking about the outsiders, the Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who are helping arm them, and even the Salafis, who are associated with al-Qaeda, going in and helping build bombs for the opposition. Is this really what we want as a country?

We have no business doing anything other than working with Russia and helping to bring about a peaceful resolution. And it can be done. There are many in the internal opposition in Syria that want exactly that approach. And they’re saying—and I think probably the best thing that’s been written about this recently is Jonathan Steele’s excellent article in the latest Nation magazine. What they want is for the international community to butt out, except for helping bring about a diplomatic, peaceful resolution. And as so many of them say, you’re not going to get any democratic advances through more violence in Syria.

AMYGOODMAN: Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

DR. JILLSTEIN: Yes, and it’s as if there’s collective amnesia here, as if we didn’t just go through a decade, $5 trillion and thousands of U.S. soldiers whose lives have been sacrificed, and far more civilians whose lives have been lost, in an attempted military resolution to these civil and religious strife. And we see that in spite of putting the full force of the United States military and NATO and trillions of dollars in a decade, we have not, with all the power of that force, been able to resolve these conflicts on the ground in Iraq and in Afghanistan. So, how in the world, with a far smaller commitment—given the colossal failure of the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, how in the world are they thinking that a lesser degree of military intervention is going to solve the problem?

ROCKYANDERSON: But I don’t think that the problem here is that we failed. I think the problem is that we’re trying to assert our will and dictate the result. Can you imagine if there were Muslim countries coming into the United States and occupying us, invading us, telling us how—where to run our government and then running unmanned drones over Canada, Mexico, the United States, determining who is going to live and who’s going to die, and in the process killing hundreds, if not thousands—we don’t know how many—innocent men, women and children? It’s an outrage. And our national security is at risk long-term, because of the hostility and hatred that we’re generating throughout that part of the world. We have got to turn this around. And we, the American people, can do it.

DR. JILLSTEIN: Absolutely. And, in fact, this is a failed policy from the get-go. It’s not only failed in its impact; it’s failed from its very conception. As the human rights head for the United Nations, Navi Pillay, points out, that with arms flowing in to both sides in Syria, you have really a catastrophe in the making. We need to stop the flow of the arms. And in fact, the United States and the Obama government, in fact, undermined an international treaty that would have begun to slow down the international flow of arms. So the American role here has actually been to throw gasoline on the fires of virtually every ethnic, religious and national conflict around the Middle East through its—through its militaristic export of arms and the profiteering war industry.

BOBSCHIEFFER: I’d like to move to the next segment: red lines, Israel and Iran. Would either of you—and you’ll have two minutes—and, President Obama, you have the first go at this one. Would either of you be willing to declare that an attack on Israel is an attack on the United States, which of course is the same promise that we give to our close allies like Japan? And if you made such a declaration, would not that deter Iran? It’s certainly deterred the Soviet Union for a long, long time, when we made that—we made—we made that promise to our allies. Mr. President?

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Well, first of all, Israel is a true friend. It is our greatest ally in the region. And if Israel is attacked, America will stand with Israel. I’ve made that clear throughout my presidency.

BOBSCHIEFFER: So you’re—

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: And—

BOBSCHIEFFER: You’re saying we’ve already made that declaration.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: I will stand with Israel if they are attacked. And this is the reason why, working with Israel, we have created the strongest military and intelligence cooperation between our two countries in history. In fact, this week we’ll be carrying out the largest military exercise with Israel in history, this very week.

But to the issue of Iran, as long as I’m president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon. I made that clear when I came into office. We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy. Their currency has dropped 80 percent. Their oil production has plunged to the lowest levels since they were fighting a war with Iraq 20 years ago. So their economy is in a shambles.

And the reason we did this is because a nuclear Iran is a threat to our national security, and it’s a threat to Israel’s national security. We cannot afford to have a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world. Iran is a state sponsor of terrorism. And for them to be able to provide nuclear technology to non-state actors, that’s unacceptable. And they have said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.

So, the work that we’ve done with respect to sanctions now offers Iran a choice: they can take the diplomatic route and end their nuclear program, or they will have to face a united world and a United States president, me, who said we’re not going to take any options off the table.

The disagreement I have with Governor Romney is that, during the course of this campaign, he’s often talked as if we should take premature military action. I think that would be a mistake, because when I’ve sent young men and women into harm’s way, I always understand that that is the last resort, not the first resort.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Two minutes.

MITTROMNEY: Well, first of all, I want to underscore the same point the president made, which is that if I’m president of the United States—when I’m president of the United States, we will stand with Israel. And if Israel is attacked, we have their back, not just diplomatically, not just culturally, but militarily. That’s number one.

Number two, with regards to—to Iran and the threat of Iran, there’s no question but that a nuclear Iran, a nuclear-capable Iran is unacceptable to America. It presents a threat not only to our friends, but ultimately a threat to us, to have Iran have nuclear material, nuclear weapons that could be used against us or to use to be threatening to us.

It’s also essential for us to understand what our mission is in Iran, and that is to dissuade Iran from having a nuclear weapon through peaceful and diplomatic means. And crippling sanctions are something I called for five years ago, when I was in Israel, speaking at the Herzliya Conference. I laid out seven steps. Crippling sanctions were number one. And they do work. You’re seeing it right now in the economy. It’s absolutely the right thing to do, to have crippling sanctions. I would have put them in place earlier, but it’s good that we have them.

Number two, something I would add today is I would tighten those sanctions. I would say that ships that carry Iranian oil can’t come into our ports. I imagine the EU would agree with this, as well. Not only ships couldn’t, I’d say companies that are moving their oil can’t, people who are trading in their oil can’t. I would tighten those sanctions further.

Secondly, I’d take on diplomatic isolation efforts. I’d make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it. I would also make sure that their diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world, the same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa.

We need to increase pressure, time and time again, on Iran because anything other than a—a solution to this, which says—which stops this—this nuclear folly of theirs, is unacceptable to America. And, of course, a military action is the last resort. It is something one would only—only consider if all of the other avenues had been—had been tried to their full extent.

AMYGOODMAN: Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson, you have two minutes.

ROCKYANDERSON: This is so predictable. Once again, President Obama repeats the lie that President Ahmadinejad in Iran stated that he wanted to wipe Israel off the map. He never said it. He referred to the regime in Israel one day being in the dustbin of history. It was a misinterpretation, and it is so warmongering of both of these candidates to talk about how they will basically blow Iran away.

Romney wants to impose crippling sanctions. Who would he be crippling? He’d be crippling, among others, some of the hundreds of thousands of people who stood in Tehran in a candlelight vigil in sympathy for the victims of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. And by the way, the people in the United States have stood in solidarity with the Iranian people after their last election with candlelight vigils in this country. It’s time that the people of both nations express their solidarity with one another and express our disdain, our disgust with these leaders who are engaging in this conduct that is ultimately going to lead to utter tragedy for the people of Iran.

Would Mitt Romney say that we should go over and attack North Korea because they have a nuclear bomb? How about Pakistan? How about China? How about Russia? We have an obligation, number one, to start reducing the number of nuclear weapons and provide that kind of leadership, because it’s the United States who has led the way for other nations to build up their nuclear armaments. And if Iran feels like they’re going to be attacked—and that’s all they’re hearing nowadays—of course they’re going to consider building a nuclear capability to deter an attack. But there is no evidence that they have any nuclear capability. And it’s an utter lie, totally baseless, for Mitt Romney to say that Iran is four years closer to building a nuclear weapon.

AMYGOODMAN: Dr. Jill Stein.

DR. JILLSTEIN: And here again, we’re seeing the candidates very similar to each other. They’re both saber-rattling about Iran. They’re both vowing their obedience to the right-wing government in Israel. And they are both saying that they will stop at nothing, but that war will be the last result. So, once again, we’re seeing shades of gray here between the Democratic and Republican candidates, but we’re not seeing what the American people really need and what international security really needs.

In fact, Iran recently hosted the non-aligned nations. It’s not just Iran. It was all the non-aligned nations with them—Brazil and Argentina and many others—that together put forward a proposal for eliminating nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East and, in fact, eliminating nuclear weapons throughout the world. That is the true solution that we should be getting behind. And in fact, I should add that—

AMYGOODMAN: Ten seconds.

DR. JILLSTEIN: —this—this slave-like mentality towards Israel is absolutely unjustified. We need to start raising the bar for Israel and holding them to an equal standard for supporting human rights and international law and ending occupations and illegal settlements and apartheid.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. When we continue with our "Expanding the Debate" special after the break, all four candidates discuss the military budget. Stay with us.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We continue with our "Expanding the Debate" special, including two third-party presidential candidates excluded from last night’s debate: Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. During a special broadcast Monday night, we broke the sound barrier during the Obama-Romney debate to get real-time responses from Stein and Anderson. We also invited Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson; he declined to join us. This is debate moderator Bob Schieffer of CBS News.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Governor, you say you want a bigger military. You want a bigger Navy. You don’t want to cut defense spending. What I want to ask you—we were talking about financial problems in this country. Where are you going to get the money?

MITTROMNEY: Well, let’s—let’s come back and talk about the military, but all the way—all the way through. First of all—I’m going through, from the very beginning—we’re going to cut about 5 percent of the discretionary budget, excluding military. That’s number one. All right? And that’s—

BOBSCHIEFFER: But can you do this without—

MITTROMNEY: You know, the good—the good news is—

BOBSCHIEFFER: —driving us deeper into debt?

MITTROMNEY: I’ll—I’ll be happy to have you take a look. Come on our website. You look at how we get to a balanced budget within eight to 10 years. We do it by getting—by reducing spending in a whole series of programs. By the way, number one I get rid of is "Obamacare." There are a number of things that sound good, but frankly, we just can’t afford them. And that one doesn’t sound good, and it’s not affordable. So I’d get rid of that one from day one. To the extent humanly possible, we get that out. We take program after program that we don’t absolutely have to have, and we get rid of them.

Number two, we take some programs that we are going to keep, like Medicaid, which is a program for the poor—we’re—take that healthcare program for the poor, and we give it to the states to run, because states run these programs more efficiently. As a governor, I thought, please, give me this program. I can—

BOBSCHIEFFER: Can he do that, Mr. President?

MITTROMNEY: I can run this more efficiently than the federal government. And states, by the way, are proving it. States like Arizona, Rhode Island have taken these—these Medicaid dollars, have shown they can run these programs more cost-effectively.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Bob, but—

MITTROMNEY: And so, I want to do those two things and get this—get this to a balanced budget with eight—in eight to 10 years.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Bob—

BOBSCHIEFFER: Let’s—

MITTROMNEY: But the military—let’s—let’s get back to the military, though.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Well—

BOBSCHIEFFER: That’s what I’m trying to find out about.

MITTROMNEY: Well, let’s—let’s talk about the military.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: I want to—you should have answered the first question.

Look, Governor Romney has called for $5 trillion of tax cuts that he says he’s going to pay for by closing deductions. Now, the math doesn’t work, but he continues to claim that he’s going to do it. He then wants to spend another $2 trillion on military spending that our military is not asking for.

Now, keep in mind that our military spending has gone up every single year that I’ve been in office. We spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined—China, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, you name it, next 10. And what I did was work with our Joint Chiefs of Staff to think about what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe. And that’s the budget that we’ve put forward.

But what you can’t do is spend $2 trillion in additional military spending that the military is not asking for, $5 trillion on tax cuts. You say that you’re going to pay for it by closing loopholes and deductions, without naming what those loopholes and deductions are. And then somehow you’re also going to deal with the deficit that we’ve already got. The math simply doesn’t work.

But when it comes to our military, what we have to think about is not, you know, just budgets; we’ve got to think about capabilities. We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be thinking about space. That’s exactly what our budget does, but it’s driven by strategy. It’s not driven by politics. It’s not driven by members of Congress and what they would like to see. It’s driven by what are we going to need to keep the American people safe. That’s exactly what our budget does. And it also then allows us to reduce our deficit, which is a significant national security concern, because we’ve got to make sure that our economy is strong at home so that we can project military power overseas.

MITTROMNEY: Bob, I’m pleased that I’ve balanced budgets. I was in the world of business for 25 years. If you didn’t balance your budget, you went out of business. I went to the Olympics, that was out of balance, and we got it on balance and made a success there. I had the chance to be governor of a state. Four years in a row, Democrats and Republicans came together to balance the budget. We cut taxes 19 times, balanced our budget. The president hasn’t balanced a budget yet. I expect to have the opportunity to do so myself.

BOBSCHIEFFER: All right.

MITTROMNEY: I’m going to be able to balance the budget.

Let’s talk about military spending. And that’s this.

BOBSCHIEFFER: About 30 seconds.

MITTROMNEY: Our Navy—our Navy is older—excuse me, our Navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. The Navy said they needed 313 ships to carry out their mission. We’re now down to 285. We’re headed down to the—to the low 200s if we go through a sequestration. That’s unacceptable to me. I want to make sure that we have the ships that are required by our Navy. Our Air Force is older and smaller than any time since it was founded in 1947. We’ve changed, for the first time since FDR, we—since FDR, we had the—we’ve always had the strategy of saying we could fight in two conflicts at once. Now we’re changing to one conflict.

Look, this, in my view, is the highest responsibility of the president of the United States, which is to maintain the safety of the American people. And I will not cut our military budget by a trillion dollars, which is a combination of the budget cuts that the president has, as well as the sequestration cuts. That, in my view, is making—is making our future less certain and less secure, and I won’t do it.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Bob, I just need to comment on this.

First of all, the sequester is not something that I proposed. It’s something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen. The budget that we’re talking about is not reducing our military spending; it’s maintaining it.

But I think Governor Romney maybe hasn’t spent enough time looking at how our military works. You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military has changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines. And so, the question is not a game of Battleship where we’re counting ships; it’s what are our capabilities.

And so, when I sit down with the secretary of the Navy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we determine how are we going to be best able to meet all of our defense needs in a way that also keeps faith with our troops, that also makes sure that our veterans have the kind of support that they need when they come home. And that is not reflected in the kind of budget that you’re putting forward, because it just doesn’t work.

BOBSCHIEFFER: All right.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: And, you know, we visited the website quite a bit, and it still doesn’t work.

BOBSCHIEFFER: A lot to cover. I’d like—I’d like—

AMYGOODMAN: Dr. Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, on this issue of military spending.

DR. JILLSTEIN: Yeah, well, I think they both made the case for us, that the numbers just don’t add up. We cannot continue spending a trillion dollars a year on this bloated military-industrial-security complex without having to really pay the price here at home. And they’re talking about, you know, a balanced budget. They’re talking about needing to educate our students.

You know, let’s look at where that money is going. We are spending trillions every year not only on the bloated military budget, but on the wars for oil as part of that, as well as the bailouts for Wall Street and tax breaks for the very wealthy. And unfortunately, we don’t see either of these candidates—not the Democrats and not the Republicans—really changing any of those really serious problems. Right now, the Federal Reserve is again bailing out Wall Street, effectively for the fourth time. This is the third quantitative easing on top of the TARP program, which was $700 billion. But that $700 billion under George Bush has become many, many trillions under Barack Obama. So these bailouts continue, and now we’re doing a quantitative easing to the tune of $40 billion every month, again to bail out the banks. It’s time to be breaking up the big banks and bailing out the students instead. They’ve got it the other way around: they’re breaking up the students and bailing out the banks. And we need to put an end to that.

Likewise, we are squandering trillions of dollars over the coming decade on a massive, wasteful health insurance, private health insurance bureaucracy. And the alternative to austerity is actually moving to a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system, which makes austerity unnecessary. So, in fact, by moving to a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system, we get a system that people are happy with, that they love and want to defend from government tampering, in fact, and that system covers everyone comprehensively, puts you back in charge of your healthcare, and, in addition, it actually saves us trillions over the coming decade, equivalent to that austerity plan that they were talking about. And the way it does that is by changing—what we have right now is 30 percent of every healthcare dollar is being spent on bureaucracy, red tape and paper pushing. Under Medicare, that 30 percent shrinks down to 2 to 3 percent. That’s enough to cover everybody. And—and we deserve that.

Now, in addition, under Medicare for all, this healthcare inflation, which is going like this on the curve of expenses over time, much faster—it’s inflating much faster than a inflation in the economy. But what happens when you move to a Medicare-for-all system is that that hyperinflation in healthcare, with your premiums and your co-pays going up practically every month, that is put an end to. So we go back to an inflation level like the level of the economy, and that saves us trillions of dollars over the coming decade.

So, these are the ways that we should be spending our tax dollars, not on the military, but on what we need here at home. And by conserving those dollars instead of squandering them, we can actually spend them on the things that we need, on bailing out the students and on creating public higher education, which is free, tuition-free, the way that it should be.

ROCKYANDERSON: Well, we’ve heard another great example of how the Republican and Democratic candidates for president, just like their cohorts in Congress, are basically one and the same in terms of their corporatism and their militarism. It’s just a matter of degree.

President Obama is bragging about increasing military spending these last four years? Well, this is how it works. The F-22 weapons program, Republicans and Democrats alike tried to keep it alive, even though the secretary of defense said it’s an outmoded system, we’ve never used it, we’re not going to use it—billions of dollars going into the system just for maintenance and repair. And it was Republicans and Democrats fighting for continued funding. And then you wonder, why would they do that? It’s because the general contractor for that weapon system—they know what they’re doing when it comes to Congress—they put in place contractors or subcontractors in 44 different states. So you had Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer and the Republican from Utah’s 1st Congressional District all fighting for continued funding, because they wanted to take the bacon back home so they could brag about it when they run the next time. That is treasonous conduct, when people are looking out for their own political interests and hammering the American people, especially when there are so many unmet needs in this country.

Mitt Romney is one of the greatest flim-flam mans—men of all time. He says we’re going to start with a $16 trillion debt, we’re going to give everybody a 20 percent tax cut, and then we’re going to do away with some deductions. But have you noticed he’s never identified what those deductions are going to be? Well, the studies say—people have taken a look at this—really, even if he did away with mortgage deductions and charitable deductions, which he’s not likely to do, if you take all of those deductions, you can’t give more than 4 percent in tax cuts without adding to our deficit, so there is no way that he could meet anywhere near these promises of balancing the budget. Instead, we would see more like we saw under the Reagan and the second Bush administrations, with record deficits with these Republican presidents.

Now, in terms of jobs, our employers in this country are at a huge competitive disadvantage with their competitors overseas, because we are the only nation in the entire developed world that doesn’t provide insurance coverage for everyone, and we’re paying more than twice the average of the rest of the industrialized world. And we’re getting far worse medical outcomes. More than 70 percent of the American people and the majority of doctors during the healthcare debate said they wanted to see a single-payer, Medicare-for-all system in place. And this president wouldn’t even let the proposal see the light of day, because he, like the rest of the members in Congress, with the exception of a handful who were courageous enough, at least for a while, to stand up against the corrupting money, they caved in to the for-profit insurance industry and the pharmaceutical companies. And once again, we end up getting shafted, the American people, again. We can’t stand for it anymore. We need to send a message: there are going to be political consequences every time the corporate sector wins out over the interests of the American people.

AMYGOODMAN: Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson. That concludes our final "Expanding the Debate" special, adding the voices of third-party presidential candidates excluded from the debate. To see the full expanded final debate, go to our website at democracynow.org. Oh, and tune in to our special election night coverage.

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Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0400Middle East Protests at U.S. Embassies Spread in Uproar over Anti-Muslim U.S. Filmhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/13/middle_east_protests_at_us_embassies
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-13:en/story/3c9816 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Violent protests continue in the Middle East over an American-made film considered blasphemous to Islam. Earlier today, hundreds of Yemeni protesters stormed the U.S. embassy in Sana&#8217;a. The protesters smashed windows of the security offices outside the embassy and burned cars before breaking through the main gate of the heavily fortified compound. Some demonstrators scaled the walls of the embassy, while others set fires just outside the compound. Meanwhile, at least 16 demonstrators were injured earlier today outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the protesters after they threw stones and petrol bombs near the embassy.
The protests in Yemen and Egypt follow Tuesday night&#8217;s storming of the United States consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other staff members were killed in the attack. Stevens is the first U.S. ambassador to be killed on duty since 1979. On Wednesday, President Obama vowed to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths in Libya.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. We&#8217;re working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats. I&#8217;ve also directed my administration to increase our security at diplomatic posts around the world. And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Obama administration has dispatched an elite group of marines to the Libyan capital of Tripoli. In addition, two U.S. warships are reportedly heading toward the Libyan coast, and the U.S. has redeployed surveillance drones over Libya. Protests against the film have also occurred in other countries, including Iraq, Iran, Tunisia and Bangladesh.
AMY GOODMAN : At the center of the controversy is an online trailer for a low-budget film called The Innocence of Muslims . Initial reports said the film was directed by an Israeli real-estate developer living in California named Sam Bacile, but questions have arisen over whether such a person even exists. One person known to be directly involved in the film is a Coptic Christian living in California named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.
We&#8217;re going to begin today&#8217;s show in Yemen with Iona Craig, a journalist with The Times of London based in the capital of Yemen, Sana&#8217;a.
Can you tell us, Iona, what is happening outside the U.S. embassy in Sana&#8217;a right now?
IONA CRAIG : The situation now is relatively calm compared to what it was a few hours ago. Earlier this morning, protesters marched on the U.S. embassy from three different directions and breached—the approach was to the U.S. embassy building itself. They then managed to breach the cordon that had been set up on the street and managed to get inside the U.S.—to the compound itself, burning two SUV vehicles and burning the U.S. flag. When I was there, there were then shots being fired by the Yemeni security forces in attempt to push the crowd back and disperse them, but they were gathering again and burning tires and still chanting outside the U.S. embassy building.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, the press reports here, though, say that the demonstrators were eventually rebuffed or expelled from the embassy grounds?
IONA CRAIG : Yes, that&#8217;s correct. As I said, there&#8217;s kind of three approach roads up to the—up to the embassy building, and they were being pushed back beyond these concrete blocks they&#8217;re using as roadblocks in order to secure the area around the embassy building itself. But I have to say, when I was there, I witnessed protesters again trying to breach that cordon. And at one point, the soldiers, the Yemeni soldiers, just let them through. And as they marched closer to the U.S. embassy building itself, the soldiers were actually just walking alongside them and letting them go. Before then, eventually turning around and opening fire over the heads of the demonstrators.
AMY GOODMAN : Iona Craig, can you tell us what is the complaint of these protesters? Is this film that was supposedly made in California—is this the root of these protests?
IONA CRAIG : This is what they all tell me. All the people I spoke to today and certainly the chanting that was going on is all related to this film. They saw it as an insult against Prophet Muhammad. It&#8217;s blasphemy. They were calling for the death of the filmmaker. And they said they would not leave until the Americans left, is what they were chanting, and that they wanted to see the U.S. embassy closed as a result of this. I have to say, amongst the people I spoke to, I didn&#8217;t actually find anybody that has seen the picture, this film, that has been posted on YouTube. But they had all certainly heard about it. And this is almost [inaudible] what we&#8217;ve seen in Libya and in Egypt, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : There was a drone attack that supposedly killed the number two man in al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. The Yemeni government took credit for this attack. We have seen in WikiLeaks documents over time that the Yemeni government does take credit for U.S. drone strikes, so it&#8217;s not clear exactly what happened. Was the issue of the drone attack raised, as well?
IONA CRAIG : Of all the people that I asked, there was no—there was no relationship between that. Nobody mentioned the issue of drones. Nobody mentioned even that there was a killing of AQAP&#8217;s number two—and, by the way, it isn&#8217;t confirmed yet; it&#8217;s not 100 percent—or even an attack two weeks ago that killed 13 civilians 90 miles south of Sana&#8217;a. All the people I spoke to, it is all related to this film. Nobody mentioned the issue of drones, even those that have increased the anti-American rhetoric here over the last year amongst the wider population. This [inaudible] just a few hundred, really, that approached the American embassy have said they&#8217;re were specifically there for—the people that I spoke to, anyway—in retaliation to this film that they saw as an insult on Prophet Muhammad.
AMY GOODMAN : Iona Craig, we want to thank you for joining us from Yemen. Iona Craig is an English journalist based in Sana&#8217;a, editor at the Yemen Times and The Times of London , as we turn now to Cairo. Democracy Now! &#8217;s correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous is in the Egyptian capital.
Sharif, can you talk about what&#8217;s happening outside of the U.S. embassy in Cairo?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS : Hi, Amy.
I just came back from the protests there. There&#8217;s continuing clashes with police that have spilled over into Tahrir Square. The U.S. embassy lies just a couple of hundred yards from Tahrir, which was the epicenter of the revolution here in Egypt. And there are continuing tear gas being fired, rocks thrown by the protesters against police. There&#8217;s police trucks. The clashes aren&#8217;t exceptionally fierce, but there seems to be no sign of letting up, either. So, the police seem to have moved the protesters last night and the—or the early hours of this morning away from the U.S. embassy, maybe a hundred yards away, and are now kind of on the outskirts of Tahrir. Many of these protesters today and last night are really a different crowd than were there on Tuesday night when this first began, when protesters were in front of the embassy and took down the American flag. Many of these are kind of young protesters who you typically see kind of in a lot of these clashes with police. Like—as Iona mentioned in Yemen, I could not find one protester who had actually seen this—you know, the trailer for this movie, which has incited such anger. They—but everyone cited the movie as saying their reasons for being there, for being against any kind of insults for the prophet. But really these—I think it was used as a trigger by conservative Muslim groups here in Egypt. For example, Nader Bakkar, who&#8217;s a spokesperson for the Nour Party, which is the largest Salafi party here in Egypt, and it&#8217;s allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, he said on Al Jazeera Mubasher, a channel here, that the film had been broadcast on U.S. channels, which is a blatant lie. So, that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happening right now on the ground.
On the political scene, we had President Mohamed Morsi—he waited 24 hours after the initial protest on Tuesday night before releasing any kind of statement. He&#8217;s in Brussels today on his first visit as Egyptian president to Europe, and he spoke at a press conference about what&#8217;s happening. He said he condemned any attacks or any non-peaceful protest and any attacks on embassies, but he also condemned any insults to the prophet. He had a phone call with President Obama this morning, and he said he offered his condolences for the deaths of the four Americans who died in Benghazi, including Ambassador Stevens, and also said he—and said he hoped that President Obama would affirm the need for any determined legal measures against those who want to damage relations between Egypt and the United States, I think hinting at—you know, for the United States to take some kind of legal action against the producers of this movie. There&#8217;s also been at the same time Morsi&#8217;s movement. He, of course, came from the Muslim Brotherhood and is still a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood has called for protests tomorrow, peaceful protests in front of mosques. But nevertheless, it has called for protests against this movie, against insults to Islam and to the prophet. And this is the same group that last week spent last week wooing American investors to try and invest in Egypt. So, that&#8217;s really what&#8217;s happening on the ground here right now.
AMY GOODMAN : Sharif, I want to thank you for being with us. Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now! correspondent in Cairo, Egypt. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . When we come back, we&#8217;ll be joined by the—one of the leading Islamic thinkers. His new book is called Islam and the Arab Awakening . Tariq Ramadan will join us. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Violent protests continue in the Middle East over an American-made film considered blasphemous to Islam. Earlier today, hundreds of Yemeni protesters stormed the U.S. embassy in Sana’a. The protesters smashed windows of the security offices outside the embassy and burned cars before breaking through the main gate of the heavily fortified compound. Some demonstrators scaled the walls of the embassy, while others set fires just outside the compound. Meanwhile, at least 16 demonstrators were injured earlier today outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo. Police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the protesters after they threw stones and petrol bombs near the embassy.

The protests in Yemen and Egypt follow Tuesday night’s storming of the United States consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other staff members were killed in the attack. Stevens is the first U.S. ambassador to be killed on duty since 1979. On Wednesday, President Obama vowed to bring to justice those responsible for the deaths in Libya.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: The United States condemns in the strongest terms this outrageous and shocking attack. We’re working with the government of Libya to secure our diplomats. I’ve also directed my administration to increase our security at diplomatic posts around the world. And make no mistake, we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Obama administration has dispatched an elite group of marines to the Libyan capital of Tripoli. In addition, two U.S. warships are reportedly heading toward the Libyan coast, and the U.S. has redeployed surveillance drones over Libya. Protests against the film have also occurred in other countries, including Iraq, Iran, Tunisia and Bangladesh.

AMYGOODMAN: At the center of the controversy is an online trailer for a low-budget film called The Innocence of Muslims. Initial reports said the film was directed by an Israeli real-estate developer living in California named Sam Bacile, but questions have arisen over whether such a person even exists. One person known to be directly involved in the film is a Coptic Christian living in California named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

We’re going to begin today’s show in Yemen with Iona Craig, a journalist with The Times of London based in the capital of Yemen, Sana’a.

Can you tell us, Iona, what is happening outside the U.S. embassy in Sana’a right now?

IONACRAIG: The situation now is relatively calm compared to what it was a few hours ago. Earlier this morning, protesters marched on the U.S. embassy from three different directions and breached—the approach was to the U.S. embassy building itself. They then managed to breach the cordon that had been set up on the street and managed to get inside the U.S.—to the compound itself, burning two SUV vehicles and burning the U.S. flag. When I was there, there were then shots being fired by the Yemeni security forces in attempt to push the crowd back and disperse them, but they were gathering again and burning tires and still chanting outside the U.S. embassy building.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, the press reports here, though, say that the demonstrators were eventually rebuffed or expelled from the embassy grounds?

IONACRAIG: Yes, that’s correct. As I said, there’s kind of three approach roads up to the—up to the embassy building, and they were being pushed back beyond these concrete blocks they’re using as roadblocks in order to secure the area around the embassy building itself. But I have to say, when I was there, I witnessed protesters again trying to breach that cordon. And at one point, the soldiers, the Yemeni soldiers, just let them through. And as they marched closer to the U.S. embassy building itself, the soldiers were actually just walking alongside them and letting them go. Before then, eventually turning around and opening fire over the heads of the demonstrators.

AMYGOODMAN: Iona Craig, can you tell us what is the complaint of these protesters? Is this film that was supposedly made in California—is this the root of these protests?

IONACRAIG: This is what they all tell me. All the people I spoke to today and certainly the chanting that was going on is all related to this film. They saw it as an insult against Prophet Muhammad. It’s blasphemy. They were calling for the death of the filmmaker. And they said they would not leave until the Americans left, is what they were chanting, and that they wanted to see the U.S. embassy closed as a result of this. I have to say, amongst the people I spoke to, I didn’t actually find anybody that has seen the picture, this film, that has been posted on YouTube. But they had all certainly heard about it. And this is almost [inaudible] what we’ve seen in Libya and in Egypt, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: There was a drone attack that supposedly killed the number two man in al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula. The Yemeni government took credit for this attack. We have seen in WikiLeaks documents over time that the Yemeni government does take credit for U.S. drone strikes, so it’s not clear exactly what happened. Was the issue of the drone attack raised, as well?

IONACRAIG: Of all the people that I asked, there was no—there was no relationship between that. Nobody mentioned the issue of drones. Nobody mentioned even that there was a killing of AQAP’s number two—and, by the way, it isn’t confirmed yet; it’s not 100 percent—or even an attack two weeks ago that killed 13 civilians 90 miles south of Sana’a. All the people I spoke to, it is all related to this film. Nobody mentioned the issue of drones, even those that have increased the anti-American rhetoric here over the last year amongst the wider population. This [inaudible] just a few hundred, really, that approached the American embassy have said they’re were specifically there for—the people that I spoke to, anyway—in retaliation to this film that they saw as an insult on Prophet Muhammad.

AMYGOODMAN: Iona Craig, we want to thank you for joining us from Yemen. Iona Craig is an English journalist based in Sana’a, editor at the Yemen Times and The Times of London, as we turn now to Cairo. Democracy Now!’s correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous is in the Egyptian capital.

Sharif, can you talk about what’s happening outside of the U.S. embassy in Cairo?

SHARIFABDELKOUDDOUS: Hi, Amy.

I just came back from the protests there. There’s continuing clashes with police that have spilled over into Tahrir Square. The U.S. embassy lies just a couple of hundred yards from Tahrir, which was the epicenter of the revolution here in Egypt. And there are continuing tear gas being fired, rocks thrown by the protesters against police. There’s police trucks. The clashes aren’t exceptionally fierce, but there seems to be no sign of letting up, either. So, the police seem to have moved the protesters last night and the—or the early hours of this morning away from the U.S. embassy, maybe a hundred yards away, and are now kind of on the outskirts of Tahrir. Many of these protesters today and last night are really a different crowd than were there on Tuesday night when this first began, when protesters were in front of the embassy and took down the American flag. Many of these are kind of young protesters who you typically see kind of in a lot of these clashes with police. Like—as Iona mentioned in Yemen, I could not find one protester who had actually seen this—you know, the trailer for this movie, which has incited such anger. They—but everyone cited the movie as saying their reasons for being there, for being against any kind of insults for the prophet. But really these—I think it was used as a trigger by conservative Muslim groups here in Egypt. For example, Nader Bakkar, who’s a spokesperson for the Nour Party, which is the largest Salafi party here in Egypt, and it’s allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, he said on Al Jazeera Mubasher, a channel here, that the film had been broadcast on U.S. channels, which is a blatant lie. So, that’s what’s happening right now on the ground.

On the political scene, we had President Mohamed Morsi—he waited 24 hours after the initial protest on Tuesday night before releasing any kind of statement. He’s in Brussels today on his first visit as Egyptian president to Europe, and he spoke at a press conference about what’s happening. He said he condemned any attacks or any non-peaceful protest and any attacks on embassies, but he also condemned any insults to the prophet. He had a phone call with President Obama this morning, and he said he offered his condolences for the deaths of the four Americans who died in Benghazi, including Ambassador Stevens, and also said he—and said he hoped that President Obama would affirm the need for any determined legal measures against those who want to damage relations between Egypt and the United States, I think hinting at—you know, for the United States to take some kind of legal action against the producers of this movie. There’s also been at the same time Morsi’s movement. He, of course, came from the Muslim Brotherhood and is still a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood has called for protests tomorrow, peaceful protests in front of mosques. But nevertheless, it has called for protests against this movie, against insults to Islam and to the prophet. And this is the same group that last week spent last week wooing American investors to try and invest in Egypt. So, that’s really what’s happening on the ground here right now.

AMYGOODMAN: Sharif, I want to thank you for being with us. Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Democracy Now! correspondent in Cairo, Egypt. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’ll be joined by the—one of the leading Islamic thinkers. His new book is called Islam and the Arab Awakening. Tariq Ramadan will join us. Stay with us.

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Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400Islamic Scholar Tariq Ramadan on the Growing Mideast Protests and "Islam & the Arab Awakening"http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/13/islamic_scholar_tariq_ramadan_on_the
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-13:en/story/299e47 JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To talk more about the protests across the Middle East, we&#8217;re joined by Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar. He is considered one of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals in Europe and was named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the 21st century. He was barred from entering the United States for many years by President George W. Bush. In 2004, Ramadan had accepted a job to become a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame, but nine days after he was set to arrive, the Bush administration revoked his visa, invoking a provision of the PATRIOT Act. He wasn&#8217;t allowed into the United States for another six years.
AMY GOODMAN : Tariq Ramadan is the author of a number of books, including Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation and, most recently, Islam and the Arab Awakening .
We welcome you back to Democracy Now! , Professor Ramadan.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your invitation.
AMY GOODMAN : So, can you talk about the latest that&#8217;s happening right now, the beginning in Libya with the killing of the U.S. ambassador, the protests now happening throughout the Arab world? We just heard from what&#8217;s happening in Yemen, the protests in Sana&#8217;a at the U.S. embassy, in Cairo at the U.S. embassy.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Look, it&#8217;s very, very difficult and very sensitive times for many reasons, because just—you know, we were celebrating or at least remembering 11 years after September 11 in the country here. And what happened is, as you were referring, there are two scenarios. One is to say what happened in Libya was not in fact first connected to the movie, but connected to the killing Abu Yahya al-Libi in June, and this was planned—
AMY GOODMAN : And explain who he was.
TARIQ RAMADAN : He was one of the leaders of al-Qaeda, and he was killed in June. And the point was that people were saying there will be retaliation, and they choose the very same date of the September the 11th. So it might be that this connection was in fact used with the symbol at the same time we&#8217;re remembering what happened in the States. Add to this that what we have here is very much people who are behind the movie, and it&#8217;s very important to check who is behind the movie. What do they want exactly? They were using exactly the same symbol, 11 years later, just before the election, to put the president, also, Barack Obama, and the United States onto something which is a psychological pressure by releasing this and hoping that there will be reactions. It&#8217;s a provocation. And I think that here we have something which is very important for us is, first, to condemn what happened, the killing of the ambassador and what is happening in the embassies around the—in the Muslim-majority countries, to start with this, but also to understand that there are people from behind the scenes who are playing on symbols, emotional politics, and pushing toward something which is a clash.
And the second thing that we have to say—and this is important because you were talking about Mohamed Morsi and people, the Islamists in Muslim-majority countries—there is something which is going to be one of the main challenges in the Muslim world today, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Arab world, is the religious credibility. How are you going to react to what is said about Islam? So, by touching the prophet of Islam, the reaction should be, who is going to be the guardian? And you can see today that the Muslim Brotherhood are in a situation where the Salafis, then the literalists, are pushing. And they were in Libya, they were in Egypt, they are now in Yemen. So, everywhere the Salafi are pushing by saying, &quot;We are the guardian, and we are resisting any kind of relationship to the West or provocation coming from the West.&quot; And internally, it&#8217;s unsettling the whole situation. Now in Tunisian, in Libya, in Syria, in Egypt, the clash between the literalists and—the Islamists or the reformists is something which is going to be part of what we have to deal with as to the future of this country.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Interestingly, in this—in the incident in Libya yesterday, there appear to be now, as some reports are coming out, two very separate incidents that occurred. There was a mass protest that occurred early in the evening in response to the film, and then there was a much more coordinated military attack that occurred later in the night on the consulate itself. And apparently, the attackers may have known that the ambassador was in Benghazi, when he normally was not in Benghazi. So, this clearly seems to have been more of a—some would call it a blowback on the United States government for its support, its military support, of all kinds of fighters in Libya against Gaddafi, including Islamist extremists.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yes, I think that this is a very fair point. You know, even after the whole democratization process, it&#8217;s quite clear that the United States are not seen in a positive way in all the Muslim-majority countries—in Egypt, in Libya, even in Tunisia—even though we have now a kind of trying to be recognized as democrats by the Islamists who are running, you know, Tunisia and Egypt. But the popular sentiment is very, very negative. So, what happened in Libya, it&#8217;s clearly connected to the role of the United States when it comes to dealing with terrorists, dealing with the factions in Libya. This is something which is there, and it&#8217;s clearly a bad perception, a negative perception. The point is how this is going to evolve when people are trying to deal with emotions and pushing towards this. So this is where the Islamic reference in such a way is going to be on two fronts. First, what we have within the Sunni tradition is this clash between the literalists and all the other trends and the Salafi movement, that are very much acting on the ground and using the popular sentiment to act against the West.
AMY GOODMAN : People might not know what you mean by the literalists and the Salafi movement.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yes, that&#8217;s a very important point. We have to define this, because, you know, Salafi is a very broad concept in Islam. What we have now is, like, for example, the Nour Party in Egypt or the Salafi in Tunisia are people who, in fact, we call very often Wahhabi, following the Saudi school of thought and law. And they are literalists in the way where it&#8217;s black and white, there&#8217;s a very narrow interpretation of the scriptural sources. For decades, we knew that they were there, but they were not involved in politics. What is completely new for all of us over the last three years is that they are now within the political arena and playing the democratic game. One year ago, the people from the Nour Party, before even creating a party, was saying democracy is not Islamic. And all of a sudden, in eight months, they enter into the political game, and they got 24 percent, meaning that this is a political power. And they are—they have some credentials, and they are playing with this. And the perception in the West is, oh, they are the same as the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, no. They were even supporting the candidate who left the Muslim Brotherhood, to put the Muslim Brotherhood in a very difficult situation. And they are backed and supported by financial, you know, support by organizations that are coming from Saudi Arabia, even Qatar, and these organizations are supporting them financially. And they are now in Tunisia. When I was in Tunisia talking to the president, he was telling me, &quot;We didn&#8217;t know about these people before. How come, in less than six months, they are there, and they are pushing?&quot; And this is to make the whole democratization process unsettled, on the basis of the Islamic reference.
So this is why, as Muslims and as Muslim scholars and intellectuals, we have to be very clear on what is acceptable and what is this accepted diversity in Islam, and things that are done like yesterday, then the day before yesterday, that are completely non-Islamic, against our principles, because there is now a connection between some literalists and violent extremists, who want to kill, who want to get the kind of popular support. And populism is everywhere. We have religious populism in the Muslim-majority countries as much as we have populism in the United States of America. The reaction of Mitt Romney about saying, &quot;Oh, you don&#8217;t have to apologize, and you have first to be clear on the fact that this is our values,&quot; is playing with symbols. It&#8217;s just to put Barack Obama in a situation where he has to condemn first what happened and to celebrate the American values. I think it&#8217;s tricky.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in your book, Islam and the Arab Awakening , you really concentrate on the complexity of this enormous movement that has developed, that escapes most observers here in the West. And you particularly focus on the question of whether it&#8217;s wrong to consider this really revolutions that are occurring here or whether they are more uprisings or popular movements that, yes, are expressing the desires of the people for freedom, but yet are being manipulated and, to some extent, attempts at controlling them from all sides, not just from the West—
TARIQ RAMADAN : Exactly, yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —but from the religious and other political groups within Islam itself.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yes, I&#8217;m very happy that you are saying &quot;being manipulated&quot; or try to be manipulated from many sides, not only from the West. What I&#8217;m advocating in the book, after having studied the whole thing before, is to tell us today that this was not known, that the people were not aware, that they were bloggers and cyber-dissidents, this is completely wrong on both sides. Even the president, Mubarak, and Ben Ali, they knew about people being trained. So, this is one thing.
What is irreversible in the Arab world is this intellectual revolution, the awakening that we can get rid of dictators. That is here, and the people have this sentiment and this political power. They feel that they can do it, and it&#8217;s still there. At the same time, we don&#8217;t know what is going to happen. So to be very quick by saying, &quot;Oh, revolutions and Arab Spring,&quot; and—you know, what I&#8217;m advocating is to take a cautious optimism as the starting point of our analysis and to look at what is happening.
The perception in the Arab world now is that we are dealing—having secularists against Islamists, and that&#8217;s it. So the secularists are progressive; the Islamists are reactionary, conservative. This perception is wrong. It&#8217;s not only coming from the West, by the way; it&#8217;s even in the Muslim-majority countries. In Tunisia, this is where the debate is very superficial on ideological positioning. We have to come to the true questions about which kind of social policy, which kind of state. It&#8217;s not enough to tell us it&#8217;s a civil state with Islamic reference. We need to know what Islamic reference, because this is exactly where the Salafi are telling us Islamic reference means that you cannot say what you are saying about the prophet, for example, you cannot ridicule, and you&#8217;re going to be judged or tried if you do this. So we don&#8217;t have a clear understanding of all this challenges. And when it comes to social justice, when it comes to corruption, when it comes to the role of the army—because now we are talking about Mohamed Morsi representing Egypt—we should be much more cautious with the role of the army in Egypt to be playing a very important role from behind the scene.
AMY GOODMAN : On that issue of President Morsi, I want to turn to President Obama&#8217;s comments on Egypt. He made them on Wednesday during an interview with Telemundo&#8217;s José Díaz-Balart. Obama said he does not consider the new Egyptian government led by the Muslim Brotherhood to be an ally. Excerpts of the interview first aired last night on MSNBC .
JOSÉ DÍAZ- BALART : Would you consider the current Egyptian regime an ally of the United States?
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : You know, I don&#8217;t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don&#8217;t consider them an enemy. They are a new government that is trying to find its way. They were democratically elected. I think that we are going to have to see how they respond to this incident, how they respond to, for example, maintaining the peace treaty in—with Israel. So far at least, what we&#8217;ve seen is that in some cases they&#8217;ve said the right things and taken the right steps; in others, how they&#8217;ve responded to various events may not be aligned with our interests. And so, I think it&#8217;s still a work in progress. But certainly, in this situation, what we&#8217;re going to expect is that they are responsive to our insistence that our embassy is protected, our personnel is protected. And if they take actions that indicate they&#8217;re not taking those responsibilities, as all other countries do where we have embassies, I think that&#8217;s going to be a real big problem.
AMY GOODMAN : So, here you have President Obama saying that the Egyptian government is not considered an ally, but not our enemy, either, he says. NBC is saying Obama&#8217;s strong words could mark a dramatic shift in the U.S. relationship with Egypt, which has been consistently pro-American since the late President Anwar Sadat. Tariq Ramadan?
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yeah, look, it&#8217;s a very smart and diplomatic statement. I think that he cannot say anything but this, for two reasons. First, if he was to say Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood, is an ally, he&#8217;s going to be destroyed here by, you know, the opposition saying, &quot;How come you can say that the Islamists are your ally when these people are the same who are Hamas, and Hamas is against Israel?&quot; It&#8217;s the end of it. So he&#8217;s saying, &quot;We are just wait and see; we are trying to deal.&quot;
At the same time, we should know that the American administration is very much involved with the Egyptian army. And when you talk about the Egyptian army, we don&#8217;t only talk about, you know, political power, we talk about economic power. And in all the discussion, what I&#8217;m saying in the book, which is for me very important, is that not to underestimate the economic reasons of all what is happening there, because we have China, and we have Russia, and we have new actors in the region that are helping us to understand the situation from another angle.
On the other side, he is saying about the Muslim Brotherhood, we are talking—we know that they were in touch with the Muslim Brotherhood for years trying to understand what is their stand and what is their vision. And if he was to say now—
AMY GOODMAN : Your grandfather, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yeah, yes, yes. So, this is the—what I&#8217;m saying here is that, in his positioning with the Muslim Brotherhood, what he&#8217;s saying is we wait and see, and we know that they were dealing with them. The Muslim Brotherhood on this, if he was to say, &quot;They are our allies,&quot; they will lose their credibility within. So the Muslim Brotherhood should be perceived as not very much Western, not very much with the current Obama administration. From behind the scenes, there are some questions that we have to ask the Muslim Brotherhood, when it comes to economic options and choices with the IMF , straightaway, with the World Bank. So I think that on many economic—on other sides, economic sides and political sides, it&#8217;s quite clear that, for the time being, there is an agreement between the American administration and the Muslim Brotherhood to try to find a way to deal to one another and to try to find solutions. So, this is why I&#8217;m critical of what is happening with the Muslim Brotherhood, not only on the political side, but the economic choices.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the economic imperatives in another battle of the Arab awakening, in Libya. You, in your book, give a masterful recounting of the behind-the-scenes operations of France and the United States in the only popular uprising in which they interceded directly. Could you talk about that and the role of France in cornering much of the oil market in Libya even before the Western intervention?
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yes. If we study the facts before and what was happening in Libya, you know, the reaction of Russia and China should be understood in the light of what happened in Libya, their reaction on Syria, because they lost the economic—their economic interest and their access to the oil resources in Libya because of what happened. They took the United Nations, you know, resolution on no-fly zone as, you know, a permission for NATO to go there and intervene. In fact, this was not for the sake of, you know, the Libyan blood. It was for economic geostrategic interests and to secure their interests. So, Barack Obama was unable to go there for many reasons, because he had internal crisis, and there is these Afghani and Iraqi fronts. It&#8217;s impossible to add another one. So there was a deal with France. And France was involved, you know. Even we had, you know, a new foreign ministers, like [inaudible]. He went there, and he was, you know, the figure who was helping France to find the [inaudible] and to create this transitory national council. But this was not done for the sake of, you know, the democratization in Libya. It&#8217;s quite clear now that all the economic interest and the access to resources is secured between four countries. The first one is the United States of America, France, Britain and Qatar, who are also involved in the whole thing. So we need to be less naive in the whole process and to deal with the situation, country per country, and understanding that there are challenges, there are from behind-the-scene alliances that are now important.
There is something that I want to say. All this discussion about the Islamists—and I&#8217;m studying it in the book—you know, we have to deal with the Islamists on the ground, see what they are going to do. Remember 10 years ago what was said about Erdogan? He&#8217;s going to change the country into an Islamist country, a new Iran? It&#8217;s not going to happen.
AMY GOODMAN : The Turkish leader.
TARIQ RAMADAN : The Turkish leader. So now we have to deal with them and see what they are going to do. But there is one point which is clear: the United States of America or the Western countries, they don&#8217;t have a problem with Islamists as long as they are neoliberal capitalists and promoting the economic order. And the best example is the petro-monarchies. The petro-monarchies, they don&#8217;t want democracy. They say there is no democracy in Islam. But they are within the economic system. So the question—
AMY GOODMAN : Who are the petro-monarchists? Which countries?
TARIQ RAMADAN : The petro-monarchies are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, even Bahrain. Bahrain, we had protests in Bahrain, and they were tortured and repression. We don&#8217;t cover this. We didn&#8217;t cover this. And no one was saying that the government—it was translated into Shia-Sunni clashes. It&#8217;s wrong. There is clearly a lack of democracy there. And we need to come with something which is, don&#8217;t tell us that Islam in itself is a problem—is exactly what Barack Obama just said yesterday. If they are with us, protecting our interests, we will deal with them; if not, we will struggle.
AMY GOODMAN : Al Jazeera&#8217;s role in covering the Arab world?
TARIQ RAMADAN : Yes, I&#8217;m talking about it in the book, saying it&#8217;s quite—it&#8217;s quite—we have to look at the way they were dealing with this, pushing in Egypt, pushing In Tunisia, silent in Bahrain, silent in—so, it&#8217;s a selective—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And pushing Libya, as well.
TARIQ RAMADAN : Exactly. Of course, they were, even, you know, sending armies and people. So, all—you know, Jazeera in itself, perceived as a counter, you know, Fox News Channel, has to be also questioned as to the intention. And we know now—you know, the Arabs and the people in the Arab world are very much supportive of Al Jazeera, taking it as a credible source of news. Now it&#8217;s much more questioned by the people. When I was in Tunisia, I say, &quot;What do they want exactly? For whom are they running ? What do they want?&quot; And there is something which is connected to the government. So I think that in all this, it&#8217;s clear that it played a very positive role in Egypt by pushing the people. But we need to look at political—the whole scene and the whole region to understand that there are much more questions to be asked about what are the intentions from behind—you know, from supporting some uprisings and forgetting others.
AMY GOODMAN : Like?
TARIQ RAMADAN : Like Bahrain, for example, as I was saying, and being silent, for example, about what also was happening in Libya, what also is happening in Iraq, and very much nurturing this sense of &quot;be careful, al-Qaeda is there, the terrorists.&quot; You know, it&#8217;s also nurturing a mindset. It&#8217;s as if, you know, doing the job of &quot;be careful, terrorism is around the corner,&quot; and I think that this is—this is to be questioned.
AMY GOODMAN : Comparison of how the U.S. has dealt with Syria and Bahrain?
TARIQ RAMADAN : Well, I think that—no, they are not dealing with; they are supporting silently what the Saudi are doing with Bahrain, which is supporting the current regime. You can&#8217;t have anything happening today within the petro-monarchies, is going to be too risky for the United States and the oil interests there.
In Syria, for eight months—and this is why I&#8217;m saying it&#8217;s not all under control—all the people who are saying, &quot;Oh, it&#8217;s all done by the U.S., and it&#8217;s a conspiracy.&quot; I say, no, in Syria for eight months, President Barack Obama and the European administrations were hoping Bashar al-Assad was going to reform the regime from within, and it appeared that the people were more courageous. They didn&#8217;t want him to stay. So they were trying to find opposition and people with whom they can deal, because they had two problems. The driving force of the opposition in Syria was also the Muslim Brotherhood and leftists who were not very much supportive of the Americans. So they were trying to find who are the people with whom we can deal. And it took eight months. Now they want to change the government, but it&#8217;s as if they are facing Russia and China, and both are in agreement not to agree on what to do.
And, in fact, the unsettled situation in Syria could be, in fact, interesting for both sides. And unsettled Middle East, in these times where the people are trying to find their way towards democracy, could be interesting for many reasons—for weapons to be sold, for new geostrategic interests to be protected, and something that we are not talking about, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The people who are lost in the whole discussion here are the Palestinians. We have demonstrations in Palestine in West Bank. Nobody is covering this. It&#8217;s as if they don&#8217;t exist anymore. And this is, in fact, central. And Israel is silent. The only thing that we heard once is Mubarak should stay because, if he&#8217;s not going to come, we would have Islamists, and then we have the Muslim Brotherhood, and this is what—and then nothing. It&#8217;s as if Israel is not playing in the whole run. And I think that this is wrong.
Add to this a second question, which will be very important for the United States, but also for the European countries, is the new actors. What I&#8217;m saying here is the BRIC countries—Brazil, India, China, Turkey, South Africa, Indonesia even, and Russia—are now new actors. Over the last eight years, China multiplied by seven its economic presence and penetration in the Middle East. And if this happens on economic terms and there is a shift towards the East, the relationship between these countries and Israel is completely different from the United States. And it means that the challenges are going to be different, because China is not supporting Israel the way the U.S. are supporting Israel. So we need to have all these factors in mind. I&#8217;m trying to analyze this in the book by saying, be cautious, but there is still optimism, because the people now are facing challenges. A what I would like, knowing that in the Muslim-majority countries you can&#8217;t do without Islam, we can&#8217;t do without their culture, in which way they are going to come back to this Islamic reference to find a way to deal with the true challenges and not the superficial political questions.
AMY GOODMAN : We want to thank you very much for being with us, Tariq Ramadan, heading back now to Britain. His latest book is called Islam and the Arab Awakening . Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University and visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar. He is the author of a number of influential books. Time magazine has named Tariq Ramadan one of the most important innovators of the 21st century. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the Poverty Tour 2.0. We&#8217;ll speak with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West as they travel the country confronting poverty. Stay with us. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: To talk more about the protests across the Middle East, we’re joined by Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar. He is considered one of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals in Europe and was named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the 21st century. He was barred from entering the United States for many years by President George W. Bush. In 2004, Ramadan had accepted a job to become a tenured professor at the University of Notre Dame, but nine days after he was set to arrive, the Bush administration revoked his visa, invoking a provision of the PATRIOT Act. He wasn’t allowed into the United States for another six years.

AMYGOODMAN: Tariq Ramadan is the author of a number of books, including Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation and, most recently, Islam and the Arab Awakening.

We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Professor Ramadan.

TARIQRAMADAN: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your invitation.

AMYGOODMAN: So, can you talk about the latest that’s happening right now, the beginning in Libya with the killing of the U.S. ambassador, the protests now happening throughout the Arab world? We just heard from what’s happening in Yemen, the protests in Sana’a at the U.S. embassy, in Cairo at the U.S. embassy.

TARIQRAMADAN: Look, it’s very, very difficult and very sensitive times for many reasons, because just—you know, we were celebrating or at least remembering 11 years after September 11 in the country here. And what happened is, as you were referring, there are two scenarios. One is to say what happened in Libya was not in fact first connected to the movie, but connected to the killing Abu Yahya al-Libi in June, and this was planned—

AMYGOODMAN: And explain who he was.

TARIQRAMADAN: He was one of the leaders of al-Qaeda, and he was killed in June. And the point was that people were saying there will be retaliation, and they choose the very same date of the September the 11th. So it might be that this connection was in fact used with the symbol at the same time we’re remembering what happened in the States. Add to this that what we have here is very much people who are behind the movie, and it’s very important to check who is behind the movie. What do they want exactly? They were using exactly the same symbol, 11 years later, just before the election, to put the president, also, Barack Obama, and the United States onto something which is a psychological pressure by releasing this and hoping that there will be reactions. It’s a provocation. And I think that here we have something which is very important for us is, first, to condemn what happened, the killing of the ambassador and what is happening in the embassies around the—in the Muslim-majority countries, to start with this, but also to understand that there are people from behind the scenes who are playing on symbols, emotional politics, and pushing toward something which is a clash.

And the second thing that we have to say—and this is important because you were talking about Mohamed Morsi and people, the Islamists in Muslim-majority countries—there is something which is going to be one of the main challenges in the Muslim world today, in the Muslim-majority countries in the Arab world, is the religious credibility. How are you going to react to what is said about Islam? So, by touching the prophet of Islam, the reaction should be, who is going to be the guardian? And you can see today that the Muslim Brotherhood are in a situation where the Salafis, then the literalists, are pushing. And they were in Libya, they were in Egypt, they are now in Yemen. So, everywhere the Salafi are pushing by saying, "We are the guardian, and we are resisting any kind of relationship to the West or provocation coming from the West." And internally, it’s unsettling the whole situation. Now in Tunisian, in Libya, in Syria, in Egypt, the clash between the literalists and—the Islamists or the reformists is something which is going to be part of what we have to deal with as to the future of this country.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Interestingly, in this—in the incident in Libya yesterday, there appear to be now, as some reports are coming out, two very separate incidents that occurred. There was a mass protest that occurred early in the evening in response to the film, and then there was a much more coordinated military attack that occurred later in the night on the consulate itself. And apparently, the attackers may have known that the ambassador was in Benghazi, when he normally was not in Benghazi. So, this clearly seems to have been more of a—some would call it a blowback on the United States government for its support, its military support, of all kinds of fighters in Libya against Gaddafi, including Islamist extremists.

TARIQRAMADAN: Yes, I think that this is a very fair point. You know, even after the whole democratization process, it’s quite clear that the United States are not seen in a positive way in all the Muslim-majority countries—in Egypt, in Libya, even in Tunisia—even though we have now a kind of trying to be recognized as democrats by the Islamists who are running, you know, Tunisia and Egypt. But the popular sentiment is very, very negative. So, what happened in Libya, it’s clearly connected to the role of the United States when it comes to dealing with terrorists, dealing with the factions in Libya. This is something which is there, and it’s clearly a bad perception, a negative perception. The point is how this is going to evolve when people are trying to deal with emotions and pushing towards this. So this is where the Islamic reference in such a way is going to be on two fronts. First, what we have within the Sunni tradition is this clash between the literalists and all the other trends and the Salafi movement, that are very much acting on the ground and using the popular sentiment to act against the West.

AMYGOODMAN: People might not know what you mean by the literalists and the Salafi movement.

TARIQRAMADAN: Yes, that’s a very important point. We have to define this, because, you know, Salafi is a very broad concept in Islam. What we have now is, like, for example, the Nour Party in Egypt or the Salafi in Tunisia are people who, in fact, we call very often Wahhabi, following the Saudi school of thought and law. And they are literalists in the way where it’s black and white, there’s a very narrow interpretation of the scriptural sources. For decades, we knew that they were there, but they were not involved in politics. What is completely new for all of us over the last three years is that they are now within the political arena and playing the democratic game. One year ago, the people from the Nour Party, before even creating a party, was saying democracy is not Islamic. And all of a sudden, in eight months, they enter into the political game, and they got 24 percent, meaning that this is a political power. And they are—they have some credentials, and they are playing with this. And the perception in the West is, oh, they are the same as the Muslim Brotherhood. In fact, no. They were even supporting the candidate who left the Muslim Brotherhood, to put the Muslim Brotherhood in a very difficult situation. And they are backed and supported by financial, you know, support by organizations that are coming from Saudi Arabia, even Qatar, and these organizations are supporting them financially. And they are now in Tunisia. When I was in Tunisia talking to the president, he was telling me, "We didn’t know about these people before. How come, in less than six months, they are there, and they are pushing?" And this is to make the whole democratization process unsettled, on the basis of the Islamic reference.

So this is why, as Muslims and as Muslim scholars and intellectuals, we have to be very clear on what is acceptable and what is this accepted diversity in Islam, and things that are done like yesterday, then the day before yesterday, that are completely non-Islamic, against our principles, because there is now a connection between some literalists and violent extremists, who want to kill, who want to get the kind of popular support. And populism is everywhere. We have religious populism in the Muslim-majority countries as much as we have populism in the United States of America. The reaction of Mitt Romney about saying, "Oh, you don’t have to apologize, and you have first to be clear on the fact that this is our values," is playing with symbols. It’s just to put Barack Obama in a situation where he has to condemn first what happened and to celebrate the American values. I think it’s tricky.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in your book, Islam and the Arab Awakening, you really concentrate on the complexity of this enormous movement that has developed, that escapes most observers here in the West. And you particularly focus on the question of whether it’s wrong to consider this really revolutions that are occurring here or whether they are more uprisings or popular movements that, yes, are expressing the desires of the people for freedom, but yet are being manipulated and, to some extent, attempts at controlling them from all sides, not just from the West—

TARIQRAMADAN: Exactly, yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —but from the religious and other political groups within Islam itself.

TARIQRAMADAN: Yes, I’m very happy that you are saying "being manipulated" or try to be manipulated from many sides, not only from the West. What I’m advocating in the book, after having studied the whole thing before, is to tell us today that this was not known, that the people were not aware, that they were bloggers and cyber-dissidents, this is completely wrong on both sides. Even the president, Mubarak, and Ben Ali, they knew about people being trained. So, this is one thing.

What is irreversible in the Arab world is this intellectual revolution, the awakening that we can get rid of dictators. That is here, and the people have this sentiment and this political power. They feel that they can do it, and it’s still there. At the same time, we don’t know what is going to happen. So to be very quick by saying, "Oh, revolutions and Arab Spring," and—you know, what I’m advocating is to take a cautious optimism as the starting point of our analysis and to look at what is happening.

The perception in the Arab world now is that we are dealing—having secularists against Islamists, and that’s it. So the secularists are progressive; the Islamists are reactionary, conservative. This perception is wrong. It’s not only coming from the West, by the way; it’s even in the Muslim-majority countries. In Tunisia, this is where the debate is very superficial on ideological positioning. We have to come to the true questions about which kind of social policy, which kind of state. It’s not enough to tell us it’s a civil state with Islamic reference. We need to know what Islamic reference, because this is exactly where the Salafi are telling us Islamic reference means that you cannot say what you are saying about the prophet, for example, you cannot ridicule, and you’re going to be judged or tried if you do this. So we don’t have a clear understanding of all this challenges. And when it comes to social justice, when it comes to corruption, when it comes to the role of the army—because now we are talking about Mohamed Morsi representing Egypt—we should be much more cautious with the role of the army in Egypt to be playing a very important role from behind the scene.

AMYGOODMAN: On that issue of President Morsi, I want to turn to President Obama’s comments on Egypt. He made them on Wednesday during an interview with Telemundo’s José Díaz-Balart. Obama said he does not consider the new Egyptian government led by the Muslim Brotherhood to be an ally. Excerpts of the interview first aired last night on MSNBC.

JOSÉ DÍAZ-BALART: Would you consider the current Egyptian regime an ally of the United States?

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: You know, I don’t think that we would consider them an ally, but we don’t consider them an enemy. They are a new government that is trying to find its way. They were democratically elected. I think that we are going to have to see how they respond to this incident, how they respond to, for example, maintaining the peace treaty in—with Israel. So far at least, what we’ve seen is that in some cases they’ve said the right things and taken the right steps; in others, how they’ve responded to various events may not be aligned with our interests. And so, I think it’s still a work in progress. But certainly, in this situation, what we’re going to expect is that they are responsive to our insistence that our embassy is protected, our personnel is protected. And if they take actions that indicate they’re not taking those responsibilities, as all other countries do where we have embassies, I think that’s going to be a real big problem.

AMYGOODMAN: So, here you have President Obama saying that the Egyptian government is not considered an ally, but not our enemy, either, he says. NBC is saying Obama’s strong words could mark a dramatic shift in the U.S. relationship with Egypt, which has been consistently pro-American since the late President Anwar Sadat. Tariq Ramadan?

TARIQRAMADAN: Yeah, look, it’s a very smart and diplomatic statement. I think that he cannot say anything but this, for two reasons. First, if he was to say Egypt, with the Muslim Brotherhood, is an ally, he’s going to be destroyed here by, you know, the opposition saying, "How come you can say that the Islamists are your ally when these people are the same who are Hamas, and Hamas is against Israel?" It’s the end of it. So he’s saying, "We are just wait and see; we are trying to deal."

At the same time, we should know that the American administration is very much involved with the Egyptian army. And when you talk about the Egyptian army, we don’t only talk about, you know, political power, we talk about economic power. And in all the discussion, what I’m saying in the book, which is for me very important, is that not to underestimate the economic reasons of all what is happening there, because we have China, and we have Russia, and we have new actors in the region that are helping us to understand the situation from another angle.

On the other side, he is saying about the Muslim Brotherhood, we are talking—we know that they were in touch with the Muslim Brotherhood for years trying to understand what is their stand and what is their vision. And if he was to say now—

AMYGOODMAN: Your grandfather, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

TARIQRAMADAN: Yeah, yes, yes. So, this is the—what I’m saying here is that, in his positioning with the Muslim Brotherhood, what he’s saying is we wait and see, and we know that they were dealing with them. The Muslim Brotherhood on this, if he was to say, "They are our allies," they will lose their credibility within. So the Muslim Brotherhood should be perceived as not very much Western, not very much with the current Obama administration. From behind the scenes, there are some questions that we have to ask the Muslim Brotherhood, when it comes to economic options and choices with the IMF, straightaway, with the World Bank. So I think that on many economic—on other sides, economic sides and political sides, it’s quite clear that, for the time being, there is an agreement between the American administration and the Muslim Brotherhood to try to find a way to deal to one another and to try to find solutions. So, this is why I’m critical of what is happening with the Muslim Brotherhood, not only on the political side, but the economic choices.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about the economic imperatives in another battle of the Arab awakening, in Libya. You, in your book, give a masterful recounting of the behind-the-scenes operations of France and the United States in the only popular uprising in which they interceded directly. Could you talk about that and the role of France in cornering much of the oil market in Libya even before the Western intervention?

TARIQRAMADAN: Yes. If we study the facts before and what was happening in Libya, you know, the reaction of Russia and China should be understood in the light of what happened in Libya, their reaction on Syria, because they lost the economic—their economic interest and their access to the oil resources in Libya because of what happened. They took the United Nations, you know, resolution on no-fly zone as, you know, a permission for NATO to go there and intervene. In fact, this was not for the sake of, you know, the Libyan blood. It was for economic geostrategic interests and to secure their interests. So, Barack Obama was unable to go there for many reasons, because he had internal crisis, and there is these Afghani and Iraqi fronts. It’s impossible to add another one. So there was a deal with France. And France was involved, you know. Even we had, you know, a new foreign ministers, like [inaudible]. He went there, and he was, you know, the figure who was helping France to find the [inaudible] and to create this transitory national council. But this was not done for the sake of, you know, the democratization in Libya. It’s quite clear now that all the economic interest and the access to resources is secured between four countries. The first one is the United States of America, France, Britain and Qatar, who are also involved in the whole thing. So we need to be less naive in the whole process and to deal with the situation, country per country, and understanding that there are challenges, there are from behind-the-scene alliances that are now important.

There is something that I want to say. All this discussion about the Islamists—and I’m studying it in the book—you know, we have to deal with the Islamists on the ground, see what they are going to do. Remember 10 years ago what was said about Erdogan? He’s going to change the country into an Islamist country, a new Iran? It’s not going to happen.

AMYGOODMAN: The Turkish leader.

TARIQRAMADAN: The Turkish leader. So now we have to deal with them and see what they are going to do. But there is one point which is clear: the United States of America or the Western countries, they don’t have a problem with Islamists as long as they are neoliberal capitalists and promoting the economic order. And the best example is the petro-monarchies. The petro-monarchies, they don’t want democracy. They say there is no democracy in Islam. But they are within the economic system. So the question—

AMYGOODMAN: Who are the petro-monarchists? Which countries?

TARIQRAMADAN: The petro-monarchies are Saudi Arabia, Qatar, even Bahrain. Bahrain, we had protests in Bahrain, and they were tortured and repression. We don’t cover this. We didn’t cover this. And no one was saying that the government—it was translated into Shia-Sunni clashes. It’s wrong. There is clearly a lack of democracy there. And we need to come with something which is, don’t tell us that Islam in itself is a problem—is exactly what Barack Obama just said yesterday. If they are with us, protecting our interests, we will deal with them; if not, we will struggle.

AMYGOODMAN: Al Jazeera’s role in covering the Arab world?

TARIQRAMADAN: Yes, I’m talking about it in the book, saying it’s quite—it’s quite—we have to look at the way they were dealing with this, pushing in Egypt, pushing In Tunisia, silent in Bahrain, silent in—so, it’s a selective—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And pushing Libya, as well.

TARIQRAMADAN: Exactly. Of course, they were, even, you know, sending armies and people. So, all—you know, Jazeera in itself, perceived as a counter, you know, Fox News Channel, has to be also questioned as to the intention. And we know now—you know, the Arabs and the people in the Arab world are very much supportive of Al Jazeera, taking it as a credible source of news. Now it’s much more questioned by the people. When I was in Tunisia, I say, "What do they want exactly? For whom are they running ? What do they want?" And there is something which is connected to the government. So I think that in all this, it’s clear that it played a very positive role in Egypt by pushing the people. But we need to look at political—the whole scene and the whole region to understand that there are much more questions to be asked about what are the intentions from behind—you know, from supporting some uprisings and forgetting others.

AMYGOODMAN: Like?

TARIQRAMADAN: Like Bahrain, for example, as I was saying, and being silent, for example, about what also was happening in Libya, what also is happening in Iraq, and very much nurturing this sense of "be careful, al-Qaeda is there, the terrorists." You know, it’s also nurturing a mindset. It’s as if, you know, doing the job of "be careful, terrorism is around the corner," and I think that this is—this is to be questioned.

AMYGOODMAN: Comparison of how the U.S. has dealt with Syria and Bahrain?

TARIQRAMADAN: Well, I think that—no, they are not dealing with; they are supporting silently what the Saudi are doing with Bahrain, which is supporting the current regime. You can’t have anything happening today within the petro-monarchies, is going to be too risky for the United States and the oil interests there.

In Syria, for eight months—and this is why I’m saying it’s not all under control—all the people who are saying, "Oh, it’s all done by the U.S., and it’s a conspiracy." I say, no, in Syria for eight months, President Barack Obama and the European administrations were hoping Bashar al-Assad was going to reform the regime from within, and it appeared that the people were more courageous. They didn’t want him to stay. So they were trying to find opposition and people with whom they can deal, because they had two problems. The driving force of the opposition in Syria was also the Muslim Brotherhood and leftists who were not very much supportive of the Americans. So they were trying to find who are the people with whom we can deal. And it took eight months. Now they want to change the government, but it’s as if they are facing Russia and China, and both are in agreement not to agree on what to do.

And, in fact, the unsettled situation in Syria could be, in fact, interesting for both sides. And unsettled Middle East, in these times where the people are trying to find their way towards democracy, could be interesting for many reasons—for weapons to be sold, for new geostrategic interests to be protected, and something that we are not talking about, which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The people who are lost in the whole discussion here are the Palestinians. We have demonstrations in Palestine in West Bank. Nobody is covering this. It’s as if they don’t exist anymore. And this is, in fact, central. And Israel is silent. The only thing that we heard once is Mubarak should stay because, if he’s not going to come, we would have Islamists, and then we have the Muslim Brotherhood, and this is what—and then nothing. It’s as if Israel is not playing in the whole run. And I think that this is wrong.

Add to this a second question, which will be very important for the United States, but also for the European countries, is the new actors. What I’m saying here is the BRIC countries—Brazil, India, China, Turkey, South Africa, Indonesia even, and Russia—are now new actors. Over the last eight years, China multiplied by seven its economic presence and penetration in the Middle East. And if this happens on economic terms and there is a shift towards the East, the relationship between these countries and Israel is completely different from the United States. And it means that the challenges are going to be different, because China is not supporting Israel the way the U.S. are supporting Israel. So we need to have all these factors in mind. I’m trying to analyze this in the book by saying, be cautious, but there is still optimism, because the people now are facing challenges. A what I would like, knowing that in the Muslim-majority countries you can’t do without Islam, we can’t do without their culture, in which way they are going to come back to this Islamic reference to find a way to deal with the true challenges and not the superficial political questions.

AMYGOODMAN: We want to thank you very much for being with us, Tariq Ramadan, heading back now to Britain. His latest book is called Islam and the Arab Awakening. Tariq Ramadan is a professor of Islamic studies at Oxford University and visiting professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies in Qatar. He is the author of a number of influential books. Time magazine has named Tariq Ramadan one of the most important innovators of the 21st century. This is Democracy Now! When we come back, the Poverty Tour 2.0. We’ll speak with Tavis Smiley and Cornel West as they travel the country confronting poverty. Stay with us.

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Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400From Military Threats to Crippling Sanctions, U.S.-Israel Posturing on Iran Stokes Fears of Warhttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/15/from_military_threats_to_crippling_sanctions
tag:democracynow.org,2012-08-15:en/story/39f4ba AMY GOODMAN : Could Israel launch an attack on Iran before the U.S. election in November? As the drums of war beat louder in Israel, we turn right now to two guests in Washington, D.C. Trita Parsi is with us, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel, and the United States . His new book is called A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama&#8217;s Diplomacy with Iran . And Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has written many books, including Understanding the U.S.-Iran Crisis: A Primer .
Phyllis, let&#8217;s begin with you. This escalation in the United States, most people in this country wouldn&#8217;t even know this was taking place as it escalates in Israel. What does this mean for the United States?
PHYLLIS BENNIS : This is a very dangerous moment, Amy. I think that what we heard from Gideon Levy is very important, that there is a huge divide in Israel between the security, the military and the intelligence leadership, who are uniformly opposed to an Israeli strike, and the two top political leaders, the prime minister and the defense minister, who are agitating incredibly harshly for exactly that kind of a strike. We have the same thing here in the United States: massive opposition, both from the military and the intelligence services and from the political leadership here in the White House. The problem is there is a right wing—the neocons in the punditry, some of the right-wing columnists in the mainstream media, and, of course, by implication, the presidential contender, Mitt Romney, the Republican contender for president.
When Romney was in Israel, he used the kind of language, as we just heard, that was very anodyne in terms of an overall level of support for anything Israel might do. More significantly, his top foreign policy adviser, while in Israel, said explicitly that the candidate, that Romney, supports the Israeli definition of a red line, of at what point would they use force, would they use military force against Iran, and not the U.S. red line. There&#8217;s a vast difference between the two. Both are incredibly dangerous. The notion that any country is setting a red line and saying, &quot;If you cross that red line, we&#8217;re going to use force,&quot; is not only crazy and won&#8217;t work, but it&#8217;s a complete violation of international law.
But given that there are red lines in both the U.S. and Israel, it&#8217;s important to recognize the difference. The Israeli red line is based on what they call Iran&#8217;s nuclear capability, meaning some combination of: they have access to enriched uranium, and they have the technical know-how to build a bomb. In fact, any country that has a nuclear power program has that capability. Iran arguably has it now. They&#8217;re not making a bomb, as the U.S. has said. They don&#8217;t have a bomb, as the U.S. has said. And they haven&#8217;t even decided whether they want to build a bomb sometime in the future, as the U.S. has said. But nonetheless, that capability exists. The U.S. position is our red line is Iran having a nuclear weapon, a nuclear-armed Iran. That&#8217;s years down the line.
So when we hear this coming from Israel, particularly right now at this very vulnerable time of an election cycle here in the United States, what we&#8217;re hearing is that if there is going to be an Israeli strike, and with the political leadership saying there is, there&#8217;s not going to be a military coup in Israel where the military would refuse to carry out such an order. If they are told to do it, they will do it. The choice that the leadership has is, do we wait until after the election, when we might get a president we like better, meaning Mitt Romney, but we might get Barack Obama again, who might be in a stronger position? Imagine the problems facing President Obama today if we heard from the Israelis, &quot;Oh, by the way, our planes are in the air. They are en route to bomb Iran. And we&#8217;re expecting your help to send refueling capacity, for instance, in the air. And if you don&#8217;t, our pilots might die.&quot; Imagine what that would mean for a president running for re-election here in the United States. So we have a very dangerous moment despite the opposition of the military and the intelligence agencies of all across Israel, all across the United States, everybody disagreeing with this, the vice president, the president of the United States disagreeing with it. And yet, do we want to imagine that we would be certain there be no such attack and no such U.S. involvement at this moment of the election? I think it&#8217;s a very, very dangerous—a very, very dangerous moment.
It is true that in the past, when Israel has preventively attacked Arab countries, those being Iraq in 1981 and Lebanon in 2007, on the claim that they might someday be able to build a nuclear bomb, it was after silence. It was not after this kind of public campaign, public ratcheting up of the war rhetoric. This would be a very different scenario. But Bibi Netanyahu is a very different kind of Israeli prime minister in a host of ways, and I don&#8217;t think we can depend on those prior approaches to necessarily reflect what&#8217;s going on this time.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Well, I want to turn to some of the comments that have been made recently by Israel&#8217;s ambassador to the U.S. Speaking Monday, he said that Israel is threatened by Iran in a way that the United States is not. Ambassador Michael Oren was speaking on MSNBC .
AMBASSADOR MICHAEL OREN : There are structural differences between the United States and Israel which we can&#8217;t ignore, Andrea. The United States is a big country with very large capabilities, located far from the Middle East. Israel is a small country with certain capabilities, located in Iran&#8217;s backyard. And Israel, not the United States, is threatened almost weekly, if not daily, about—with annihilation by Iranian leaders. And so, as Iran continues to expand its program, both increasing its stockpiles—we now think they have close to five bombs worth of enriched uranium—and as they keep to—keep on moving that program underground to places which will be beyond our capabilities, then it&#8217;s built in that our considerations, our clocks, are moving faster.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren also said that all other measures had failed to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program.
AMBASSADOR MICHAEL OREN : We&#8217;ve now had five months of diplomacy, attempts to get Iran to negotiate an end to its nuclear program. They haven&#8217;t worked. We&#8217;ve had several now years of sanctions against Iran. The sanctions haven&#8217;t worked. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Iranian nuclear program is actually accelerating. It&#8217;s not stopping. Now, keep in mind that no country has a greater stake than Israel in resolving the Iranian nuclear threat by diplomatic means. We have the most skin in the game, Andrea. We&#8217;re right next door. And Iranian leaders—Ahmadinejad, the chief of the Iranian military—have just recently reiterated their goal, which is the annihilation of the state of Israel. We have to be very realistic about this. If diplomacy has not succeeded, sanctions have not succeeded, we have to keep very seriously all of those options on the table.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : That was Michael Oren, Israel&#8217;s ambassador to the U.S. Trita Parsi, you&#8217;re with the National Iranian American Council. Can you comment on what the ambassador said?
TRITA PARSI : Well, I think the ambassador has played a significant role in bringing the debate in this country to a hysterical level in which a lot of facts are just simply thrown out the window. And we&#8217;re looking at it from a perspective in which—a frame in which we&#8217;re essentially saying we either have to take military action or accept an Iranian nuclear bomb. Those are not the options. That is not the accurate frame. There are plenty of other options. Diplomacy certainly has not been exhausted. In fact, it&#8217;s only in its very early phases so far. So, there&#8217;s a deliberate attempt there to push it towards a position in which the only options are bomb now or bomb later.
But I think, also go back and talk about why we&#8217;re seeing this flurry of threats from the Israeli side at this moment. I would agree with the previous panelist in that this is different from previous cases, and we have to be careful not to necessarily dismiss it. But we also have to keep in mind that there is a value for the Netanyahu government to continue to make these threats and continue to increase the pressure on the Obama administration. If these threats work, as they have had success in the past, it would mean that the United States would move further into pursuing more sanctions on Iran, further away from pursuing a diplomatic compromise, and moving closer into the U.S. itself taking military action. If the Obama administration, on the other hand, resists and pushes back against Netanyahu two or three months before the elections, it would accentuate the differences that exist between Obama and the Romney campaign, which the Netanyahu government, I believe, calculates will benefit Romney in the U.S. elections. And the Obama administration, I think, agrees with that, in the sense that they don&#8217;t want to have a public spat with the Israeli government right before elections. The alternative, that the Israelis actually will take military action, would bring very unpredictable repercussions. As it was mentioned earlier on, there&#8217;s a lot of opposition to this within the Israeli military. The proposition of just making the threat, however, seems to be a win-win for the Israelis. Regardless of what Obama does, it does bring some benefit to the Netanyahu government. It either increases the likelihood of a Romney victory in the elections, or it pushes the U.S. closer towards the U.S. using the military option.
NERMEEN SHAIKH : Trita Parsi, what do you think the Obama administration should be doing now?
TRITA PARSI : Well, I think the Obama administration should be pursuing the type of diplomacy that has been successful in the past. It means that, on the one hand, the U.S. needs to tell the Israelis no and stick to it, because a military action by the Israelis, as the U.S. military has said on numerous cases, including in this segment, would not bring about the type of consequences that the U.S. would like to see. In fact, it would increase the likelihood of Iran going nuclear down the road. At the same time, he needs to pursue diplomacy with Iran in a patient way and focusing on what is possible. There is a solution to this case. It&#8217;s very important to understand this. This is not in any way, shape or form an impossible dilemma. There is a solution. The problem, though, is that the political will, on all sides—and this includes the Iranians, as well—have been lacking in being able to come to that conclusion. The contours of that deal is essentially that the United States—that the Iranians would be able to retain some levels of enrichment on their own soil, but under very, very strict inspections, additional protocol, etc., but they would completely render any option towards militarizing that nuclear program impossible. The United States then would have to accept that the Iranians have a nuclear program, but it would get its key objective, which is to make sure that the Iranians don&#8217;t have a nuclear bomb. Then there&#8217;s various technical ways of being able to implement this. But again, the problem is not technical, the problem is political. The political will to sustain diplomacy, to make sure that both sides make the compromises that are needed, have so far been lacking. AMYGOODMAN: Could Israel launch an attack on Iran before the U.S. election in November? As the drums of war beat louder in Israel, we turn right now to two guests in Washington, D.C. Trita Parsi is with us, founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, author of Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Iran, Israel, and the United States. His new book is called A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran. And Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, has written many books, including Understanding the U.S.-Iran Crisis: A Primer.

Phyllis, let’s begin with you. This escalation in the United States, most people in this country wouldn’t even know this was taking place as it escalates in Israel. What does this mean for the United States?

PHYLLISBENNIS: This is a very dangerous moment, Amy. I think that what we heard from Gideon Levy is very important, that there is a huge divide in Israel between the security, the military and the intelligence leadership, who are uniformly opposed to an Israeli strike, and the two top political leaders, the prime minister and the defense minister, who are agitating incredibly harshly for exactly that kind of a strike. We have the same thing here in the United States: massive opposition, both from the military and the intelligence services and from the political leadership here in the White House. The problem is there is a right wing—the neocons in the punditry, some of the right-wing columnists in the mainstream media, and, of course, by implication, the presidential contender, Mitt Romney, the Republican contender for president.

When Romney was in Israel, he used the kind of language, as we just heard, that was very anodyne in terms of an overall level of support for anything Israel might do. More significantly, his top foreign policy adviser, while in Israel, said explicitly that the candidate, that Romney, supports the Israeli definition of a red line, of at what point would they use force, would they use military force against Iran, and not the U.S. red line. There’s a vast difference between the two. Both are incredibly dangerous. The notion that any country is setting a red line and saying, "If you cross that red line, we’re going to use force," is not only crazy and won’t work, but it’s a complete violation of international law.

But given that there are red lines in both the U.S. and Israel, it’s important to recognize the difference. The Israeli red line is based on what they call Iran’s nuclear capability, meaning some combination of: they have access to enriched uranium, and they have the technical know-how to build a bomb. In fact, any country that has a nuclear power program has that capability. Iran arguably has it now. They’re not making a bomb, as the U.S. has said. They don’t have a bomb, as the U.S. has said. And they haven’t even decided whether they want to build a bomb sometime in the future, as the U.S. has said. But nonetheless, that capability exists. The U.S. position is our red line is Iran having a nuclear weapon, a nuclear-armed Iran. That’s years down the line.

So when we hear this coming from Israel, particularly right now at this very vulnerable time of an election cycle here in the United States, what we’re hearing is that if there is going to be an Israeli strike, and with the political leadership saying there is, there’s not going to be a military coup in Israel where the military would refuse to carry out such an order. If they are told to do it, they will do it. The choice that the leadership has is, do we wait until after the election, when we might get a president we like better, meaning Mitt Romney, but we might get Barack Obama again, who might be in a stronger position? Imagine the problems facing President Obama today if we heard from the Israelis, "Oh, by the way, our planes are in the air. They are en route to bomb Iran. And we’re expecting your help to send refueling capacity, for instance, in the air. And if you don’t, our pilots might die." Imagine what that would mean for a president running for re-election here in the United States. So we have a very dangerous moment despite the opposition of the military and the intelligence agencies of all across Israel, all across the United States, everybody disagreeing with this, the vice president, the president of the United States disagreeing with it. And yet, do we want to imagine that we would be certain there be no such attack and no such U.S. involvement at this moment of the election? I think it’s a very, very dangerous—a very, very dangerous moment.

It is true that in the past, when Israel has preventively attacked Arab countries, those being Iraq in 1981 and Lebanon in 2007, on the claim that they might someday be able to build a nuclear bomb, it was after silence. It was not after this kind of public campaign, public ratcheting up of the war rhetoric. This would be a very different scenario. But Bibi Netanyahu is a very different kind of Israeli prime minister in a host of ways, and I don’t think we can depend on those prior approaches to necessarily reflect what’s going on this time.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Well, I want to turn to some of the comments that have been made recently by Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Speaking Monday, he said that Israel is threatened by Iran in a way that the United States is not. Ambassador Michael Oren was speaking on MSNBC.

AMBASSADORMICHAELOREN: There are structural differences between the United States and Israel which we can’t ignore, Andrea. The United States is a big country with very large capabilities, located far from the Middle East. Israel is a small country with certain capabilities, located in Iran’s backyard. And Israel, not the United States, is threatened almost weekly, if not daily, about—with annihilation by Iranian leaders. And so, as Iran continues to expand its program, both increasing its stockpiles—we now think they have close to five bombs worth of enriched uranium—and as they keep to—keep on moving that program underground to places which will be beyond our capabilities, then it’s built in that our considerations, our clocks, are moving faster.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren also said that all other measures had failed to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear program.

AMBASSADORMICHAELOREN: We’ve now had five months of diplomacy, attempts to get Iran to negotiate an end to its nuclear program. They haven’t worked. We’ve had several now years of sanctions against Iran. The sanctions haven’t worked. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Iranian nuclear program is actually accelerating. It’s not stopping. Now, keep in mind that no country has a greater stake than Israel in resolving the Iranian nuclear threat by diplomatic means. We have the most skin in the game, Andrea. We’re right next door. And Iranian leaders—Ahmadinejad, the chief of the Iranian military—have just recently reiterated their goal, which is the annihilation of the state of Israel. We have to be very realistic about this. If diplomacy has not succeeded, sanctions have not succeeded, we have to keep very seriously all of those options on the table.

NERMEENSHAIKH: That was Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. Trita Parsi, you’re with the National Iranian American Council. Can you comment on what the ambassador said?

TRITAPARSI: Well, I think the ambassador has played a significant role in bringing the debate in this country to a hysterical level in which a lot of facts are just simply thrown out the window. And we’re looking at it from a perspective in which—a frame in which we’re essentially saying we either have to take military action or accept an Iranian nuclear bomb. Those are not the options. That is not the accurate frame. There are plenty of other options. Diplomacy certainly has not been exhausted. In fact, it’s only in its very early phases so far. So, there’s a deliberate attempt there to push it towards a position in which the only options are bomb now or bomb later.

But I think, also go back and talk about why we’re seeing this flurry of threats from the Israeli side at this moment. I would agree with the previous panelist in that this is different from previous cases, and we have to be careful not to necessarily dismiss it. But we also have to keep in mind that there is a value for the Netanyahu government to continue to make these threats and continue to increase the pressure on the Obama administration. If these threats work, as they have had success in the past, it would mean that the United States would move further into pursuing more sanctions on Iran, further away from pursuing a diplomatic compromise, and moving closer into the U.S. itself taking military action. If the Obama administration, on the other hand, resists and pushes back against Netanyahu two or three months before the elections, it would accentuate the differences that exist between Obama and the Romney campaign, which the Netanyahu government, I believe, calculates will benefit Romney in the U.S. elections. And the Obama administration, I think, agrees with that, in the sense that they don’t want to have a public spat with the Israeli government right before elections. The alternative, that the Israelis actually will take military action, would bring very unpredictable repercussions. As it was mentioned earlier on, there’s a lot of opposition to this within the Israeli military. The proposition of just making the threat, however, seems to be a win-win for the Israelis. Regardless of what Obama does, it does bring some benefit to the Netanyahu government. It either increases the likelihood of a Romney victory in the elections, or it pushes the U.S. closer towards the U.S. using the military option.

NERMEENSHAIKH: Trita Parsi, what do you think the Obama administration should be doing now?

TRITAPARSI: Well, I think the Obama administration should be pursuing the type of diplomacy that has been successful in the past. It means that, on the one hand, the U.S. needs to tell the Israelis no and stick to it, because a military action by the Israelis, as the U.S. military has said on numerous cases, including in this segment, would not bring about the type of consequences that the U.S. would like to see. In fact, it would increase the likelihood of Iran going nuclear down the road. At the same time, he needs to pursue diplomacy with Iran in a patient way and focusing on what is possible. There is a solution to this case. It’s very important to understand this. This is not in any way, shape or form an impossible dilemma. There is a solution. The problem, though, is that the political will, on all sides—and this includes the Iranians, as well—have been lacking in being able to come to that conclusion. The contours of that deal is essentially that the United States—that the Iranians would be able to retain some levels of enrichment on their own soil, but under very, very strict inspections, additional protocol, etc., but they would completely render any option towards militarizing that nuclear program impossible. The United States then would have to accept that the Iranians have a nuclear program, but it would get its key objective, which is to make sure that the Iranians don’t have a nuclear bomb. Then there’s various technical ways of being able to implement this. But again, the problem is not technical, the problem is political. The political will to sustain diplomacy, to make sure that both sides make the compromises that are needed, have so far been lacking.